FARMERS attending Mercon Limited’s fourth annual coconut festival in Lethe, on the St James/Hanover border, this weekend will be educated in Vermo-culture and gain exposure to alternative ways to protect the environment.

“We believe that it is important to protect our environment and that is why we want to provide our farmers and other members of the community with ways to enhance our local culture,” Merle Dixon, who manages Mercon Limited, told the Observer.

Vermo-culture, she explained, is a method of using earthworms to eat away waste instead of burning.

Franklyn Brown, a representative of the Rural Agriculture Development Agency, will make that presentation.

The festival will also feature poetry and prose reading. Actors from Montego Bay’s Little Theatre Movement, led by Douglas Prout and Jane Crichton, will also perform.

Hopeton Gray, who writes of his experiences in Australia and New Guinea, will also be among the performers.

Dixon said this year’s festival will be more family-oriented than at any other time in the last four years, providing special amenities geared at entertaining children.

“We will have a merry-go-round and a play station for children under eight years. A new feature will be a tree house over the river,” she said.

The two-day festival will climax Sunday evening with the coconut guessing and husking competitions.

Farmers will be given a number of nuts to husk using traditional methods. The farmer who husks the most nuts in the allotted time will be declared the winner.