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When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, Alfredo Aponte Zayas took shelter in his grandmother’s house, which had been built to withstand strong storms. He spent two days inside consoling his eldest daughter as they watched water pouring in through the electrical sockets. When he finally ventured out, once the hurricane passed, he found a ruined landscape. What trees remained standing had been stripped to their trunks. Hundreds of cows lay dead in the fields; half-collapsed houses were everywhere.
Aponte, who is an agronomist, was employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His expertise was animal forage. After the storm, though, his job was to gather food, water and fuel from department depots and, accompanied by armed guards, deliver it to other U.S.D.A. employees around Puerto Rico. As he crisscrossed the island, he was distraught by the sight of so many people begging for food and water. “I didn’t have enough to give everyone,” he told me this summer, tearing up at the recollection.
Aponte had a farm then in Toa Alta, just west of San Juan and about an hour and a half from where he lived. He had leased the land from the government of Puerto Rico. But, impeded by downed trees and a gasoline shortage, he couldn’t get to it for three months. When he finally made it there, he saw that it was destroyed, the plantain trees flattened, the yam fields flooded. By this point, he had already been served eviction papers: He owed about $3,000 in back rent that he was unable to pay. He had been farming for less than a year.
Aponte has been obsessed with the idea of producing food since he was 10, when he would care for chickens and pigs and tend banana trees during visits to his maternal grandfather’s small farm. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and a Ph.D. in agronomy from North Dakota State University. When he returned to Puerto Rico in 2016 with his doctorate, he was pursuing a dream of feeding his people. “At some point,” he says, you have to “practice what you’ve studied for so long.”
Neither Hurricane Maria nor the eviction put an end to Aponte’s ambitions. But land is not easy to come by in Puerto Rico, where real estate prices have risen rapidly in recent years. On two occasions, Aponte was about to sign a lease, only to have the owner sell the land instead. Finally, in April, he found a landowner willing to give him a two-year lease.
On a drizzly day in September, I visited Aponte at his new farm, 48 acres in a rural part of the island’s northeast. The plot, which apparently had not been worked for a while, was covered with copses of trees amid waist-high grass and was bisected by a creek in a ravine. The area was incredibly green and lush; El Yunque, billed as the only tropical rainforest in the national park system, lies over the hills to the east.
Aponte surveyed the muddy drive leading from the main road to his land. He needed to get a small tractor up a steep incline, but the ground was saturated and slippery. “It has rained more than we expected,” he said. With the help of his father, also named Alfredo, he unstrapped the tractor from a trailer behind his pickup. As he worked, he ran through some of the challenges facing his homeland. “We’re living through many crises at once,” he said. Widespread unemployment. Cuts in education and medical services. A health crisis exacerbated by a brain drain when doctors leave for the mainland. High levels of crime — at his farm, for example, Aponte couldn’t leave his tractor unattended, or his Ford truck, or any of the fencing currently rolled up in its bed, because thieves, he said, would promptly carry everything away.
Above all, there was the climate crisis. The densely populated island — 3.26 million people live within just over 3,500 square miles — sits in the middle of what is often called hurricane alley, the band of warm tropical water that stretches from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes feed off ocean heat, so Puerto Rico is likely to experience global warming in the unusually violent form of more powerful hurricanes. Maria, a Category 4 storm when it made landfall, was the most destructive in the island’s modern history.
After cataloging so many problems — and after he had gotten the tractor up the road — Aponte changed tack. “I’m an optimist,” he said. “I believe in my people.” And he believes that farming can be a solution to multiple crises. It can provide jobs, help rebuild the economy, give people better fare to eat. Done right, it can make the island more resilient to climate change.
Aponte thought he was better prepared now. At his first farm, he erred by planting slow-growing crops. This time, he would start with fast-growing aromatic herbs that fetch relatively high prices, including mint, basil and recao, a leafy green commonly used to flavor Puerto Rican cuisine. Later, he would plant slower-growing plantains and root vegetables like yuca (cassava) and malanga (taro). In a year and a half — the remainder of his lease — he hoped to have enough for a down payment to buy the $250,000 property outright.
A lot could go wrong, from drought to pest infestation to, worst of all, another devastating hurricane. So Aponte was waiting until later in the season to plant his first crop. When I visited, he had been nervously monitoring several storms. One named Earl, parked to the northeast, was already drenching the island; Hurricane Danielle was spinning in the North Atlantic. Hurricane Fiona, which would strike Puerto Rico two weeks later, hadn’t yet formed.
Before Maria, Puerto Ricans were already about three times as likely to experience food insecurity as people on the U.S. mainland. After the hurricane, hunger became even more acute. Damaged roads hindered the distribution of available food. Javier Pérez Lafont, a professor of agricultural economics and agribusiness at the University of Puerto Rico, Utuado, describes the trauma of Maria as a turning point in young people’s awareness of their homeland’s vulnerability. “It was the drop that made the glass spill over,” he says.
In the late 1930s, Puerto Rico grew 65 percent of the food it consumed. More recently, it has imported more than 80 percent of what it needs. Most of that passes through one port in Jacksonville, Fla., more than 1,200 miles away. Puerto Ricans have long been aware that a single choke point like this makes the island extremely vulnerable to disruption, but after Maria, many of Pérez’s students seemed newly determined to do something about it. Even as the storm’s aftermath and continuing economic crisis have together contributed to the largest wave of emigration from an island that has seen several out-migrations, these aspiring farmers are working to root themselves more deeply in their homeland’s soil.
Ramón González Beiró, the territory’s secretary of agriculture, told me that he aims to double the amount of food that Puerto Rico produces for its own consumption by 2026 and that the island had made some progress toward that goal before Fiona hit. He didn’t yet have updated figures for how many farmers currently work its land. But the most recent federal census data for the island, from 2018, actually show a decline in the number of farms since 2012, part of a decades-long attrition that was undoubtedly accelerated by Hurricane Maria.
Agricultural collectives and nonprofits have multiplied, however. Urban farms have sprung up in San Juan and Ponce. The island now hosts more than 70 pop-up and independent farmers’ markets, up from just a handful a decade ago. “I have seen the boom,” says Pamela Morales, the former market manager of Cooperativa Orgánica Madre Tierra, in San Juan, one of the island’s oldest organic farmers’ markets. And an interest in more healthful local foods has spread from San Juan to poorer, more remote areas where there wasn’t much interest years ago, according to Dayna Rivera, the president of the cooperative’s board. “We have been organizing for more than 20 years,” Rivera told me. There’s much that remains to be done, she adds, but “we can see the work bearing fruit.”
New businesses are catering to, and helping to encourage, the demand for fresh, locally grown food. PRoduce, for example, started up just after Maria and now delivers produce from small and midsize farms to around 70,000 customers, mostly in San Juan. In the view of Crystal Diaz, a PRoduce founder, the grinding economic troubles have prompted many young people to give farming a try because, as she put it to me, “What do you have to lose?”
At the same time, a reappraisal of Puerto Rico’s agrarian past is taking place. While earlier generations might have considered farming undignified labor — the work of, in Aponte’s words, un pobre tonto (a poor fool) — their younger counterparts are more inclined to regard it favorably. “There used to be a disdain for the land,” says Katia Avilés-Vázquez, who is the director of a farming-focused nonprofit called Instituto Para La Agroecología. The island’s rapid industrialization and urbanization beginning in the 1950s coincided with agricultural decline. Now some question whether the older ways were discarded too hastily; traditional farmers, Avilés-Vázquez says, are increasingly honored “as remnants of an old culture.” Pérez has noticed a similar change in students’ attitudes. They used to enroll in his class seeking an easy A, he says; today they are much more serious about learning how to grow and sell food.
Puerto Rico’s farming movement shares similarities with efforts underway elsewhere to pull back from globalization. As the pandemic made clear, supply chains that stretch long distances and wind their way through multiple countries can leave the people who depend on them susceptible to the dislocations of war, natural disasters and other hard-to-predict events. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for the United States to allow the manufacturing of protective medical gear like face masks to move almost entirely offshore, especially in an age of multiplying infectious threats. Like Puerto Rico, islands such as Guam (also a U.S. territory) and Fiji are wrestling with their reliance on imported food.
The movement in Puerto Rico, a place sometimes referred to as the world’s “last” or “oldest” colony, is about more than just reconsidering globalization. It is also bound up with national pride and identity. Few Puerto Ricans have forgotten the image of President Donald Trump blithely tossing paper towels to a crowd after Hurricane Maria, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Or the fact that he refused to release federal funds to help rebuild the island until 2020, three years after Maria hit. “We are treated as third-class citizens,” Aponte’s father told me. He had just retired from the U.S. military in April, he said, emphasizing that he served in three operations in Iraq. “We are not treated the same.”
In part, what drives Aponte and others is a concept that overlaps with food security: food sovereignty — a country’s ability to determine what it produces and eats. Over Puerto Rico’s roughly 125 years as a United States territory, eating habits have shifted. Aponte complains of potatoes’ replacing native root vegetables, like yautía (related to taro), in stews. “We have become gastronomically colonized,” Ramón Couto, Aponte’s business partner, told me. Having enough calories isn’t the only concern. Those calories should come in a healthful and culturally appropriate form. For Aponte and many of his peers, food production is both an attempt to reclaim Puerto Rico’s agricultural and culinary heritage and a declaration of self-reliance.
Hurricane Maria wiped out an estimated $780 million in agricultural value in Puerto Rico. Thousands of acres of coffee, banana and plantain farms were flattened. But in areas where small, subsistence-style farming has persisted, some crops survived, especially the many root vegetables common in traditional Puerto Rican cuisine. Farmers dug up yuca, ñame and batata (cassava, yam and sweet potato) and exchanged them for other goods, or simply gave them away. Fallen bananas and plantains were collected off the ground and bartered. Before emergency food supplies from off the island could be delivered, an informal economy had emerged in some places, according to Avilés-Vázquez. People gathered to cook and supplemented their meals with locally grown food.
Some of those who took part are engaged in a type of farming called agroecology. As practiced in Puerto Rico, agroecology often involves polyculture, or growing different crops together; composting; limiting or eschewing synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; and an emphasis on improving rural life. The guiding philosophy is to manage the farm as an ecosystem. Avilés-Vázquez points to a renowned agroecological farm called El Josco Bravo to show how interest in the approach has expanded. In 2014, it began offering a semester-long course in agroecology and received 60 applications. This year, it fielded 748.
Dalma Cartagena, a founding member of Organización Boricuá, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving traditional farming techniques, views the growing appeal of agroecology as a sign that the island is finally coming to its senses. She grew up on her grandfather’s farm in the 1960s. As she remembers those days, no one had expensive belongings, and people worked hard, but everyone ate well, nourished by the food that came from their small plots of land. Neighbors shared whatever they produced. “It was a way of being that was self-sufficient,” she says. “There was a culture of mutual help that wasn’t necessarily in dollars and cents.” Cartagena doesn’t want to do away with modern, industrial agriculture, but she wants to see the virtues of that earlier era revived.
Some agroecological practices may help make Puerto Rico’s farms more resilient to hurricanes. As the world warms, the conundrum facing farmers everywhere is how to withstand the storms, droughts, heat waves and floods that are becoming ever more extreme. The answers will differ depending on the landscape. The challenges of farming the semiarid plains of Kansas are not the same as those facing farmers in the hilly and tropical interior of Puerto Rico. But there is one broadly applicable recommendation, according to John Reganold, a professor of soil science and agroecology at Washington State University: Increase organic matter in the soil. This organic matter, the residue that living things leave in the dirt, can come from dead plants, root exudates, microbes, fungi, manure, even decomposing animals and insects. It is important, Reganold told me, because it both provides “structure” that helps water infiltrate the soil (instead of washing away) and acts as a sponge, holding onto critical plant nutrients and storing water for dry periods. Generally, the more organic matter there is in soil, the less the need for fertilizer.
Conventional agriculture has developed over the past century without much regard for the organic matter in soil, Reganold says. It has, in general, been depleted through plowing and the neglect of restorative practices. In the Caribbean, topsoil is constantly at risk of being washed or blown away. But scientists have known at least since the early 2000s that certain agroecological practices can help reduce the destructive effects of storms. After Hurricane Mitch tore through Nicaragua in 1998, one large survey found that farms with cover crops and terraced slopes fared better than conventional farms lacking these features. Cover crops are grown not to be harvested but to enrich the soil and hold it in place; terraces slow the downhill flow of water. In Nicaragua, on average, agroecological farms retained 40 percent more topsoil compared with conventional plots. And they lost 18 percent less arable land to landslides.
In the years since this study, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has promoted both agroecology and what it calls “climate-smart agriculture” as a way to improve food security in the less-developed world. In Uganda, scientists have conducted experiments showing that when farmers switched to a faster-growing variety of banana, applied a thick mulch to their banana fields and used trenching, a technique of digging ditches across the slope to reduce runoff, banana production increased tenfold. Most of that improvement came from enhanced resistance to drought.
In Haiti — like Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, mountainous and vulnerable to hurricanes — Food and Agriculture Organization scientists have tested living windbreaks. Along with cover crops, planting trees that help slow the wind increased the pigeon pea harvest by 50 percent — and this was despite a Category 5 hurricane hitting the island during the study period.
William Gould, who leads the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Climate Hub, says that anecdotal evidence suggests that farms in Puerto Rico employing specific strategies recovered faster after Maria than their counterparts that didn’t. Farms with cover crops or rows planted perpendicular to the slope seemed to suffer fewer mudslides; wind breaks of trees or hedges slightly reduced the destruction of crops. Such observations have spurred interest in these techniques even among those who use conventional farming methods but want to make their farms more resistant to extreme weather. “It’s a matter of creating a more resilient landscape, where the landscape can adjust to whatever conditions we have, either drought or overwater,” says Luis Cruz-Arroyo, who directs the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resource Conservation Service in the Caribbean.
These kinds of practices can reduce costs too. Imported fertilizers can cost 25 percent more in Puerto Rico than they do on the mainland. “There is a huge incentive to minimize inputs,” Cruz-Arroyo says. More and more, farmers are interested in not tilling their soil at all, for instance; untilled soil means reduced erosion and the preservation of its organic material. There is something of a paradox here: No-till and other soil-focused techniques can actually lower crop yields, but if they lower costs by reducing the need for fertilizers and fuel, Cruz-Arroyo says, farmers can still earn more than they would otherwise.
Gould says that agriculture in Puerto Rico is at an “inflection point.” By the 1960s, the island was largely deforested, a legacy of intensive agriculture. Today tropical forest covers 50 to 60 percent of its area. To the degree that intensive agriculture, especially for commodity crops like sugar, was replaced by other industries, industrialization may have helped forests recover in Puerto Rico. That’s good for the climate (trees sequester carbon), biodiversity and the soils.
Now, as Puerto Rico contemplates the expansion of its agricultural sector, it has a unique opportunity to shape it in a more environmentally sustainable way. “There’s interest, resources and a lot of scientific expertise on the island,” Gould says. “It’s an exciting time.”
Almost five years to the day after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Hurricane Fiona made landfall on the island in September. Fiona wasn’t as powerful as Maria, but it dumped huge amounts of rain, which led to flooding, mudslides and an islandwide blackout that took weeks to resolve fully. At least 25 people died. And every farmer I was in touch with had to deal with significant damage. One lost entire fields of plantain trees, and his workers’ homes were left without water and electricity. On another farm, rushing water had carved a new — and now dried-up — river bed. Aponte, however, prepared by his experience with Maria, emerged relatively unscathed. The metal structures he had been building remained intact, and he had to contend with only a few fallen trees. By late October, he was planting recao right on schedule.
Fiona brought into stark relief, again, the extent to which climate-driven disasters challenge Puerto Rico’s farmers. Labor shortages compound their difficulties — since 2010, the territory has lost nearly 12 percent of its population, according to the 2020 census. But many of the small farmers I spoke with also find fault with their own government. They complain about funds that have not arrived from a program called Re-grow, established to help farmers recover from Hurricane Maria. (One farmer who has received government help told me he had to hire someone whose sole job was to deal with the paperwork and bureaucracy needed to get that help.) Perhaps the most trenchant complaint I heard was that there is no clear plan for supporting Puerto Rico’s agricultural sector. Whether through neglect or intent, the government has sometimes seemed to be driving people away from farming.
The moment that Aponte was served eviction papers on his first farm is captured in “Serán Dueños de la Tierra” — “Stewards of the Land” — a 2022 documentary about three agroecological farmers. Aponte reads the papers in stunned disbelief. Another young farmer featured in the film, Ian Pagán Roig, also received eviction papers for failing to pay rent. (Pagán Roig managed to keep his farm.)
‘We’re here to manage the land, not control it.’
The filmmaker, JuanMa Pagán Teitelbaum, retreated years earlier to his family farm in Puerto Rico after tiring of his job with a film-production company, and he became intrigued by what looked like a resurgence of farming in the countryside. But as he followed the young farmers, he was flabbergasted by the government’s heavy-handed treatment of his subjects while the camera was recording. Puerto Rico was supposedly seeking food security. Why, then, was the government kicking these educated and motivated farmers off the land? “It doesn’t make sense,” he told me.
When I asked the secretary of agriculture, González, about the complaints, he asked for patience. He only took his position in 2021. His office was surveying farmers and preparing long-neglected government-owned land to be leased out. “We’re doing the work,” he said. “But it’s not a quick job.” (About the evictions captured in the documentary, which occurred before he was secretary, he said with some sympathy, “We have to be clear that farming is a business,” before adding, “He who rents has to pay the rent.”)
González said he was trying to bring small farms into the fold. After Fiona, he announced grants of up to $5,000 to help agroecological farms, among other agricultural businesses. He then convened a virtual meeting with representatives from the agroecological farming community. He acknowledged to me that in the past, some government officials might have neglected these farmers, but he also worried that because of a lack of awareness, they didn’t apply for aid they were qualified for. In the meeting, he urged them to organize their operations so they could more easily receive government help. That outreach, Aponte told me, is “without precedent.” He sees it as tacit, and long overdue, recognition of the mounting interest in agroecology. “He knows that the movement is growing,” Aponte says. “They have to give it what it deserves.”
During my visit with Aponte in September, he told me that he aspired to have an agroecological farm, but that in the interests of getting his operation off the ground quickly, he had taken a few shortcuts. He admitted almost sheepishly that he had used an herbicide to kill some weeds.
He planned to eventually eschew such modern agriculture practices, he explained as we walked to an overlook. Once there, we took stock of the hilly land he hoped to own one day. He pointed to a handsome tree with red flowers, called an African tulip. It grows fast and will quickly take over if left uncontrolled, he said. He would cut it down. But he planned to leave most of the other trees, including huge stands of bamboo, in part to protect his crops and his soil from the wind — and from hurricanes. Eventually he would plant fruit trees: citrus, maybe mango. Perhaps he would bring in cows to eat back the waist-high grass and fertilize the soil with manure.
“We’re here to manage the land, not control it,” Aponte said. His ethos was to work with what nature provides rather than against it — using the open spaces already available, maintaining the forested areas that have grown up over the years. It sounded wonderful, but as we walked back toward the row of greenhouses he was erecting, we returned to a more worrisome issue that had been hanging over our conversation since the beginning.
His sixth child had just been born a week earlier. Aponte had a good job at the University of Puerto Rico’s agricultural extension service. Farming was still a side gig. Given the obstacles confronting him, did he ever feel like giving up on his farming dreams? “Never,” he said. His family enjoyed accompanying him to the farm, where 5-year-old Alfonso, in particular, relished riding on the tractor and playing with seeds and soil. He would be glad, in fact, if Alfonso — or any of his children, really — decided to become a farmer someday.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about a wave of parents who had been radicalized by anti-vaccine misinformation. Maridelis Morales Rosado is a Puerto Rican photographer and photo editor based in New York focusing on how fashion reveals aspects of identity and culture.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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