City-born and raised, multi-disciplined agripreneur Yolanda Vasconcellos is living her dream of working with both livestock and crops in the wide open spaces of Santa Fe Farms in Central Rupununi. She is now sharing the farm experience as an agricultural tourism product to Guyana and the rest of the world.
“I enjoy very much whichever aspect of agriculture I do, whether it is with crops or animals or with both. My next project is to get into permaculture – an approach to the management of land. You can marry that approach with agriculture because it allows for merging of food production with natural ecosystems. I want to embark on that soon and produce in a permaculture setting, to meet a market demand that is fertiliser free,” Vasconcellos, who is also a land design architect and beekeeper, told Stabroek Weekend in a telephone interview from Central Rupununi.
The permaculture project is more about “nutrition over production”, she said. “I am looking at nutrition over quantity and seeking to do that by a chemical free method.”