The Tribune

THE Agricultural Development Organisation and Solutions AE donated nearly $400,000 to churches to promote backyard farming yesterday.

Representatives of the FTX funded ADO, American company Solutions AE Inc, as well as Minister of Agriculture Clay Sweeting and various church leaders were in attendance at the Balmoral Club where two cheques amounting to $394,000 were presented to the Church Commercial Farming Group.

The donation will be spread among 300 local congregations.

ADO Chairman Phillip Smith said the country has a major hunger problem and he hopes the donation will help get thousands of Bahamians into backyard farming.

“It is our hope that through this donation to backyard farming, unprecedented in both scope and goal, thousands of Bahamians and residents of The Bahamas through as many as 300 churches will experience the satisfaction of farm-to-table and today we can say we are taking one more giant step toward truly beginning to eradicate hunger in The Bahamas,” Mr Smith said.

Dr Ana Everett, a representative of Solutions AE, explained that Goodforus, a faith based digital payment platform using debit and credit cards, helped her organisation match the ADO’s donation to aid in Bahamian backyard farming as well as other outreach programmes.

“In doing that we are able to make the commitments of $197,000 to opportunities like this to support food insecurity. It’s not the only area that we support, our goal is to support the faith community in kingdom building activities that span from education to agricultural projects.” Ms Everett said.

“So we are committed to this community. We’ve made a $197,000 commitment and our next commitment is for $2.8 million for a youth development centre with Living Waters with Bishop Wells. And our goal is to do about $5 million a year in The Bahamas from our payment infrastructure to support kingdom building activities.”

Both Reverend Patrick Miller of Bahamas Assemblies of God and Dr Dave Burrows of Bahamas Faith Ministries, who attended the event, gave thanks for the donation.

Yesterday, Mr Sweeting said that the donation would aid in promoting backyard farming as well as agriculture.

“It speaks towards facilitating backyard farming, which is a way where we can feed ourselves and help get Bahamians interested in farming once again. It was once part of our culture in years past and we’re getting back to that.

“During the pandemic a lot of persons did that as a part time when they were home during the lockdowns and this will help to facilitate that and help move towards persons seeing the need to feed ourselves. And hopefully young persons and women as well were trying to get them involved in the agricultural sector.”