Andrea Seechun is not one of those women for whom being a farmer means managing an enterprise from behind a desk, balancing the books, and not knowing one end of a hoe from the other. She is what we would commonly describe as ‘the real McCoy’.
She rises at ‘the crack of dawn’, dons her trousers, t-shirt and Wellingtons, and gets to her garden, even before the day has properly bestirred itself. By 7:30am she is heading back to the house to metamorphose into a wife and mother, preparing breakfast for her children – two boys and a girl, then seeing them off to school.
Afterwards, a ‘session’ of the customary domestic chores around the home precedes another visit to the garden. There is much work to be done there. The routine has persisted for twenty years and Andrea concedes that she is still to learn how to ‘turn off’.
Her love affair with the land materialised in secondary school. During visits to relatives in the Canje Creek as a teenager, she benefitted from exposure to ‘the soil’ with some of her earliest lessons being in the cultivation of ground provision. That, however, was in a much earlier life. These days, apart from being a mother of three, she is also married to a rice farmer.
Situated on a plot of land adjacent to her home at Adventure, Corentyne, Andrea’s farm yields lettuce, celery and eschallot among other crops. Over time she has added the marketing of her produce to her suite of skills, cultivating crops to ‘order’ from middlemen and going off to the Port Mourant Market to sell what she grows.
“Farming is hard work,” (listening to her alone could make your joints ache) she says. It is certainly not a pursuit for the faint-hearted and it can sometimes require “the patience of Job.” It is too, Andrea says, a matter of being prepared to take risks. “You have to learn to accept losses.” Here, she draws a parallel with motherhood, speaking with both experience and intensity about the parallels between nurturing plants and raising children.
Then there is the other cap that she wears and which has required her, for more than two decades, to make that twenty-mile journey from Adventure to Port Mourant. She needs to be there so that, along with others of her kind, the cash crops that she brings to market can keep the distribution end of the farming sector going.
On those days she must get to Port Mourant by 3:00am in order to catch the wholesale market ‘window’ which closes at 6:00am. On wholesale market days a special taxi is pressed into service. Time is of the essence. On those days when her routine makes the wholesale market trek difficult, a friend ‘steps up’ to help her.
Talking with Andrea provides some insightful lessons about the agriculture sector. One of those is that your skills as a farmer must often be matched by your acumen at marketing. She talks about the importance of arriving at the market laden with produce and in circumstances where one has no prior orders that makes disposal of produce a quick and easy job. In those circumstances, she says, one must approach the day with a positive attitude.
The really challenging days, she says, are those on which the six o’clock ‘window’ approaches and there are still bags of produce remaining to be sold. Rather than return home with those bulging bags, careful decisions must be made about price-cutting. Time was, she says, when those situations of considerable loss of earnings would bring her close to tears or sometimes cause her to want to quit. Middlemen, she says, are shrewd operators and she admits to witnessing situations in which breakdowns in negotiations between farmers and middlemen have ended in produce being dumped rather than sold at ‘rock bottom’ prices. Sometimes, she says, there are really bad days on which you have not even sold enough to meet the cost of the ‘freight’ for fetching your produce to market.
Andrea says that during the months of March and April, the trading environment had become so frustrating that she had to make a conscious decision not to bother reaping her cash crops. Reaping itself was not worth the trouble.
Like other farmers, Andrea has had her own memorable experiences arising out of the advent of COVID-19. Hers has to do with what she says was a potentially money-making batch of lettuce, an entire crop, which she lost on account of the strictures that were put in place in the wake of the pandemic. “I lost thousands of dollars’ worth of lettuce then,” she says. But what could I do. I have to continue… it’s my livelihood… you have to have patience. There are times when you tell yourself that you are getting out but at the end you return to the farm and start all over again. This is my livelihood.”
Tough times are par for the course in what is a bona fide farming family. Water-related problems resulted in the loss of the family’s entire recent rice crop. The family’s rice-farming pursuits are managed by Andrea’s husband, Jagmohan. The losses there have impacted their May-June replanting operations.
How to balance your spending in a sector that can be fraught with uncertainties is a discipline that has come progressively easier to Andrea with the passage of time. “It’s simple,” she says, “When a farmers’ market exists, you save. When it is a buyers’ market you must use your savings to help cover your expenses. It’s all about managing your money and making a conscious effort to purchase only what you need,” Andrea says.
She credits much the success that she has realised from the sector, to training provided by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Andrea has no regrets about the path she has chosen. She makes no secret of the pride she feels about the role she now plays as mentor to emerging farmers. This allows her to accompany Agricultural Officers on field visits and to offer advice on the cultivation of lettuce, celery, eschallot and thyme – crops which she says are cultivated in large quantities in the local farming sector and which are in high demand among consumers. For all her demanding schedule Andrea finds the time, twice or thrice a week to offer her ‘give back’ to the sector.
If she inclined to believe that one of her two boys could follow herself and her husband into farming, that is not something that she is prepared to lose sleep over. If she considers her own experience as a farmer to have been thoroughly rewarding, she prefers to see her children exercise choices, hopefully rewarding ones, on their own.
