Planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, and feeding the animals have long been part of life at the Caribbean Christian Centre for the Deaf (CCCD) in Manchester parish, Jamaica. On any given day, staff and students at the school’s Knockpatrick campus might be harvesting beans, squash, or vegetables as part of the educational nutritional and livelihoods program.
But when the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic led to dwindling enterprise earnings and donations to the school, the administration placed even more focus on using their land to assist in producing some of their internal food demands. In the meantime, however, there were other challenges: persistent drought meant that there simply wasn’t enough water to adequately irrigate the campus’s greenhouse and open-field crops.
That’s when the school turned to climate-smart agriculture. With support from the Jamaica Red Cross (JRC), Knockpatrick now uses solar-powered pumps to help harvest and store water for its greenhouse and farm. The CCCD had previously installed a water catchment system in the 1960s, but it has been in a state of disrepair.
Tyreke Lewis, one of 130 students who lives on the Knockpatrick campus, says the improvements have turned things around for the better: “The school will also be able to produce more goods to be sold to the community and other stakeholders. “The additional income will help us to pay our bills and other expenses. It will allow us to develop our skills to become more self-reliant for the future.”
Read more at climatecentre.org