Roger John hopes to be one of the first persons to benefit from a commercial bank loan secured by the Small Business Bureau under the first phase of the US$10 million Micro and Small Enterprise Develop-ment (MSED) project.
It will be applied to what he hopes will be a successful agricultural project that seeks to combine conventional agriculture with aquaponics—a system in which the waste produced by farmed fish supplies the nutrients for plants grown hydroponically—on a 10-acre plot of land which he has acquired on the Soesdyke-Linden Highway.
It is a formidable challenge for the 50-year-old resident of Buxton whose knowledge of crop cultivation of any kind has been secured mostly through reading. But that is not John’s only challenge; the equally imposing one reposes in the fact that he is wheelchair-bound, paralysed from the waist down on account of a fall from the verandah of his