UNIVERSITY graduate Dushaine Carty, 24, wiped the sweat from his brow as he trudged through his field of sweet potatoes near Linstead St Catherine, yesterday. He walked through a lush row of produce, pausing periodically to tug at the green plants, until he found what he was looking for. He grinned as he bent and pulled up a plump tuber with his bare hands, rubbing the dirt away to reveal a pinkish hue. It was time to reap.

“It’s one of the best feelings — reaping what you planted,” he told the Jamaica Observer yesterday, as he continued to walk through the plot. “It’s like a mother giving birth to a child. It’s something that you have a lot of joy in.”

Carty, who is also an accountant at a credit union in Kingston, grew up on the rich soil in Wakefield near Linstead. The very plot on which he stood is one that his own father tilled to put him and his six siblings through school. But, even as a promising student at the St Jago High School, Carty always knew that he would return to invest in the earth that fed and educated him.

“It’s something that has been in my family for decades. I was actually doing a bit of farming before I matriculated to The University of the West Indies,” Carty explained, as he moved to another section of the farm. “I also used to go to the market with my father before I went to school, in the early mornings, on Fridays and Tuesdays. He would go out with sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, every little thing that we could get. It was a part of me from then, and I said to myself that once I am done with university, then I think I could take it on at a more advanced level and be more impactful with it.”

It was not an easy road through university for the young man as financial hurdles were hard to clear, but he was determined to complete his education. He knew that an accounting degree would be instrumental in expanding the family legacy in ways that none of his forefathers could.

“Accounting was one of the subject areas I was most familiar with and, at the same time, when you are hoping to operate your own business, you can use your understanding of accounting as leverage. It gives you an advantage,” he said.

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 2019 and working in Kingston for a few months, Carty decided it was time to sow. He wanted to begin mass-producing sweet potatoes immediately.

“I had the land and I was ready. All I needed was the potato slips to start planting,” Carty recalled. “I asked various farmers in the area, but there was none available. There was a huge drought, and all I could get was a little crocus bag of slips, and that felt like a major setback.”

Patience is a lesson the young farmer learnt quickly as he planted those slips and nurtured them over the next few months, not for profit, but to grow enough new slips to fill the acres he had prepared for them.

A year later Carty has more than enough slips, but he now has a different shortage — manpower.

“The main challenge I have is to get persons to help me to work,” he said, shaking his head as he swilled water from a large bottle. “A lot of youngsters are not willing to do these kinds of work, and that is a major drawback to this.”

Most of the labourers that he is able to find tend to be further on in years, and are not agile enough to suit the rigours of farm work .

“The older folks…they have lived through it, and maybe have passed the time or the capability to do the work, and now it’s time for the younger generation, but most of them don’t seem to be interested in any of this kind of work,” he lamented.

But, he is not afraid of getting his own hands dirty. He said as much while he sowed the slips with nimble, experienced hands. He had prepared just over an acre of land on which to plant on and, despite having no help, he was doing just that. The next day he would swap his water boots for loafers and return to his weekday job in Kingston.

“It’s hard work. It’s a lot of work, but I try to manage my time to get everything done,” Carty said earnestly. “That’s something that anyone who is starting a business has to get used to… You have to be willing to put in the work to ensure that you have a solid foundation.”

Carty now has crops on approximately half of the 11-acre property, and is constantly reinvesting and expanding as he reaps. While sweet potatoes and cassavas are the main produce right now, he also rotates tomatoes and sweet peppers, among other crops. Though he is not yet working with any public agricultural bodies, the ambitious young man believes farming is his contribution to nation-building.

“My vision for Carty’s Farm is more expansion and contributing to Jamaica’s development by producing more of what we consume. I think that’s one of the things that we as a nation should focus more on, so I want to be a part of that,” he said. “We, the younger generation, can use technology to take this thing to another level. I also want to be an inspiration for the youth to show them that if you have the resources, you can do something with it, instead of doing nothing.”