FOR two weeks Arthur Tenant refused to visit his farm in Clermont, St Mary, worried that Hurricane Beryl had destroyed much of his crops. But on the verge of giving up, seeing the resilience of his workers who refused to quit, he was motivated to keep going.

The 85-year-old farmer said that the Category 4 hurricane which passed Jamaica on July 3 wiped out one acre of banana, another acre of plantain, a few small coconut trees, tomatoes, and more, placing him in a depressed state.

“It come like when you lose a member of your family and you are sad. That is how I feel,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

“All of my tanks blow away during the storm, my greenhouse blown down and gone. Everything did get mash up,” said a pensive Tenant as he pondered the extent of the destruction.

“We worked really hard on [the farm], and everything was coming up, and then the storm just mash them up. It was devastation,” he lamented.

Tenant shared that before the storm he was reaping little profit from the fruits of his labour, but still decided to give his workmen an increase because the cost of goods and services was going up. His plight was compounded by thieves who raided his farm before the storm, further setting him back and dampening his spirits.

“They would take all nine plantain one time before the storm. Then they would come back again after and take more. One week I said to my workers, ‘Cut down the plantains,’ and they say, ‘No man, make it stay there a little longer and ripe fully.’ And the next day it gone,” he recalled, shaking his head.

For Tenant, the hurricane would have been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, had it not been for his devoted workers who pushed him to continue.

“I did feel to give this thing up but some of the workers kind of motivated me and say, ‘Come again, let’s go back to the drawing board.’ And so we are here right now, going back to the drawing board,” Tenant told the Sunday Observer.

“Up to now me nuh really catch me real senses, and [I’m] still out of it, but it is really the motivation from the workers and my son that makes me really want to try again,” he said.

“I just try to live from day to day and hope for the best. I hear that more storms are coming, but that’s nature. No matter how much damage the storm does, the earth needs it to cool down, so you can’t go against that. I just try to accept it and move on,” he reasoned.

Henry Lawes, one of the workmen on the farm, shared that it was the first time he saw Tenant in such low spirits, and knew that he and the other workers had to do all they could to improve his mood. So, they got to work, spending countless hours in the field chopping broken limbs and fallen trees, clearing fields of spoiled tomatoes, and replanting.

“He’s still kind of ‘down-pressed’ but we try to encourage him to still push on and say, ‘Come on Arthur, make we do this again.’ All those plantains that are down, we’re gonna chop them down; and the young ones, we are going to replant and all that,” Lawes told the
Observer.

“It was a disaster but that doesn’t dampen any of these workers’ spirits. His spirit was dampened — he didn’t come here for about two weeks. But when he saw that we were still coming and we still working, it strengthened him a bit,” he added, emphasising the importance of teamwork.

He urged other farmers who are discouraged and thinking about quitting to fight the good fight and press on, noting that life will always send us challenging situations, but we can persevere.

“Life is like that where sometimes you win, sometimes you lose — sometimes you all end up not gaining or losing — but when you lose, you have to keep going. I can tell you they lost a lot because a lot had been put in, but we are replanting. We won’t give up,” said Lawes.