BY GARFIELD MYERS Editor-at-large South/Central Bureau Sunday, March 16, 2014
SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — Neil Curtis, who emigrated to the United States as a baby in 1972, knows from "personal experience" that there is "good money" to be made in Jamaican agriculture.
The way he tells it, that knowledge comes from a year he spent in Jamaica in 1995, buying and selling callaloo.
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| Student volunteers from North Eastern University, USA, plant hot pepper seedlings at Lower Prosper. (right) RADA officer Shalon Gayle says her agency will assist organic farm projects |
"I had a friend in Kingston who was affiliated to a supermarket and we started to sell callaloo... we would buy callaloo from family members in Bushy Park area (St Catherine) and we would pay them and take it to town and make X amount of money on it," recalled Curtis.
At the end of a year he had made an 800 per cent profit from the callaloo enterprise, boasted Curtis.
"I came to Jamaica with US$1,000, stayed a whole year with a rented car, with hotel expenses, and I was young so there were parties and everything; and I left Jamaica with US$8,000, so I know there is money in agriculture," he said.
That experience has been pivotal in the initiative by the non-profit Farm Up Jamaica founded by Curtis and backed by the Jamaican diaspora, to support Jamaican, agriculture through organic farming.
The organic method involves the use of natural fertilisers and pest control, instead of chemicals. Experts say a diet based on foods produced organically promotes good health and reduces the risk of non-communicable diseases.
When the Jamaica Observer caught up with Curtis recently, he was on the property of farmer Slater Garwood at Lower Prosper, three miles south of Santa Cruz, in the foot hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where an organic farm project focused on the production of Scotch bonnet peppers is ongoing.
Students from North Eastern University in Boston, USA, studying small farm holdings in Jamaica had volunteered a few hours to transplant seedlings grown organically in a greenhouse at Garwood's farm, to an open field.
The students' presence was only incidental — they having made contact through the Farm Up Jamaica website — but according to Curtis it showed that Jamaican agriculture also had potential for boosting the visitor industry.
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| Barbara Stewart of JOAM says her organisation will help farmers with organic best practices. (right) NEIL CURTIS... there is money in agriculture |
"Basically what we are looking at is agro-tourism," said Curtis, gesturing towards about 20 US students planting pepper seedlings on Slater's hillside farm.
Tourism aside, it's the core aim of increasing Jamaican food production for the export market, reducing expensive imports while at the same time helping farmers to become self sufficient that is driving the Farm Up Jamaica initiative, Curtis told the Sunday Observer.
Thus far, said Curtis, about 75 acres have been secured for the production of Scotch bonnet peppers mainly in sections of Westmoreland and St Elizabeth.
Focus is also being placed on onions for the Jamaican market which currently absorbs huge amounts of the imported product. A five-acre pilot project in organically produced onions has started at Duff House in the New Forest area of South Manchester to demonstrate the viability of that product.
Curtis — who has operated businesses in the United States and authored a book No God? Know God, though he says he subscribes to no religion — says sound business practise underpins the Farm Up Jamaica project. more
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