Nine Mile Birth Stone

Nine Mile is a small farming community located in the countryside of St. Ann’s parish, and it is the birthplace of Bob Marley. Today, the small agricultural community of Nine Mile is clinging to their farming way of life.

Lacking support from the Jamaican government, the family farms of Nine Mile and their way of life are under siege and being pushed towards extinction. Threatened by bauxite mining operations, fertile land that could be used to grow crops is taken from the farmers, mined and raped of its fertility. The land that is still being farmed is underutilized, with the majority of farmers lacking resources to help them maintain the best agriculture practices.

With an underdeveloped infra-structure, many of the fruits and vegetables that are harvested never make it to market. Instead, bags filled with cabbage can be seen left to rot on the roadside.  The trucks that pick up the produce and deliver it to the marketplace are old and unreliable, straining to make it up the inclines of barely paved, winding mountainous roads as they can only bear half the load. The rest is following in a van that is jammed full to the brim with sacks of cabbage. Meanwhile, the mining companies never seem to have a problem transporting their bauxite out of Nine Mile, their well maintained fleet of trucks utilizing a system of private roads to deliver their products to market. And so the farmers of Nine Mile continue to scrape by, fighting to maintain a way of life that is teetering on the brink of extinction. No one can say for sure how much longer the community of Nine Mile will continue to exist, but one thing is certain, without a serious change, the family farms of Nine Mile won’t be around much longer.

Bretton Clark was born in Nine Mile, and presently lives there farming and raising his family. Mr. Clark walked with us through the community, and explained how life is today for the farmers of Nine Mile.


“We got a big problem with the bauxite people, because this land was given to us by a Prime Minister known as Michael Manley, for farming for the people. In those days we got little land outside, because it’s mostly the bauxite which got the most land. So Michael Manley come up with something that the farmer should occupy some of the land, and they lease it to them. I don’t overstand what’s happening, but some other people come up with an idea to take it back, from the farmers, then what they start to do is make roads through the mountains right here… there is bauxite land right around there (pointing behind some houses under construction). What they do is digging up all these farmland, see all these farmlands they’re digging out. And there’s nothing for the people to farm. They give them a certain time to clean up the property, they can just come and bulldoze the property. And even if you own a property beside the Kaiser property, if they start to mine and blow these dynamites, it can break up your home. But what happens, what they said, is they are going to give you another home. But they want to re-settle you somewhere else from the community, which you know all your life. For us, that ain’t right.

And plus, here is the community where Bob Marley was born, and traveled the universe. Most of the people that was farming, they’re not going to like other lands. Something else, there is a big crater, like they drop an atomic bomb. And where people going to work? Where them going to farm? Most of the property owned behind these mountains is owned by Kaiser. I drive it, I travel it, and there is no way even to walk good without you falling in a hole. So most people, they try to re-settle them other place, but it’s not the same. It’ll never be the same, because they won’t even have the community relation again, all of that disappear, all of that memories from way back when. Just like they do to Indian in Canada after a time, and re-settle them other places, so the native land, they take it away. So nobody want to compromise. If somebody world can do that, and see what damage is done, to a lot of small people, especially small farmers. It’s more easier, if they cut out a section, and say ‘this is for the community of Bob Marley, because Bob Marley do so much of the world.’ So people, them can keep planting for more food, to supply many parts of the world. But you can’t tell the people them farm, when there’s no land to farm. It’s all just crater, and we not dropping no bomb here, but there’s a big hole, and they can’t fill it. What it going to fill by? It’s only more hunger and poverty. So it’s crazy, but these guys do a lot of it. So this is a community always loved farming, but it feel like it changing now.

In some way it’s going to have to stop, and maybe people them gonna rebel when they’re hungry. As Bob said, “a hungry man is a angry man.” So without no food, how them gonna survive? So maybe it’s a different kind of revolution, just reveal the truth. So if somebody in the world out there can do something and love land, let’s do it before it gets worse.”