Young farmer pleased with career choice

Aldane Watson, of Annotto Bay, St Mary, started to realise that he had a passion for agriculture while attending the Brimmervale High School in the parish and he took the decision then to pursue a career in the sector.

The now-38-year-old told The Gleaner recently that he has been able to accomplish a lot over the years through hard work and dedication.

Today, Watson – a father of two children, ages five and 13 – runs his own farms and employs five people.

“I have about 30 acres of plantain, along with another area loaded with other crops. I plant just about every crop, including sweet pepper, pumpkin, sweet corn, and watermelon. I am also a livestock farmer, rearing goats and cows,” Watson said in a Gleaner interview at the St Mary Association of Branch Societies and the Jamaica Agriculture Society Annual Agricultural Show on Easter Monday.

“Mi just gone back inna goat farming and mi have roughly 12 heads of goat and roughly 40 cows at this time,” Watson disclosed, adding that he is also a bee farmer.

He he was quick to point out that despite his love for agriculture, there has been many challenges along the way, which forced him to find creative ways to overcome them to remain successful.

The six-acre property on which he plants sweet pepper, pumpkin, sweet corn, watermelon and other crops is located close to a river, where there is easy access to water.

However, the farm with more than 30 acres of plantain is totally dependent on rainfall, which sometimes poses a challenge, as with climate change, there is no longer a guarantee that it will rain during the traditional rainy season.

“Sometime mi lose a whole heap a plantain during the dry season. I also suffered during the last [storm] that hit Jamaica,” he reflected. “But mi always manage fi bounce back from the drought, hurricane and flooding.”

Watson’s success has not gone unnoticed as Oral Lewis, head of the extension services at the Banana Board, said it is unusual for farmers to be cultivating more than 10 acres of plantain in Jamaica. Most plantain farmers, he said, probably have one to three acres of the crop at best.

“For him to have more than 30 acres of plantain is really something special, and I know that he has been doing very well with that particular crop and others,” Lewis told The Gleaner.

“He donated some bunches of plantain to our St Mary Agricultural Show and that is really something. He is a young person and whenever we have training, a good number of youngsters turn up, as he is well known and he extends invitations to young people as well,” Lewis added.

For his part, Watson said that he enjoys his career.

“Farming a good thing because a it build me. It has been very good, ... so I would encourage all young people to go into farming,” he added. “Mi really proud a miself.

“Farming is all about providing food for the consumer. Farming is a way of life – a profession and a business. The more you put in, the more you take out. So even when I suffer a loss on certain crops, I manage to make it up back with other crops that are planted in large proportion,” said the proud farmer.

gareth.davis@gleanerjm.com