19-year-old farmer tries to weather COVID storm

Omar Hudson, a 19-year-old farmer in St Elizabeth, has taken over his father's farm after his father passed away three years ago. That is how he has been providing for the family. However, since COVID-19 pandemic, business has been so slow that Hudson has resorted to a less dignified 'days' work' to stay afloat.

"A lot of people stop going to the market. That is the main factor," he said in a depressed tone. "We can't buy fertilisers to prepare the new crops, so those crops are now in danger. We are not selling anything at all so we can't afford the fertiliser," Hudson told THE STAR.

"When I take my stuff to the market, I can count the amount of sales I get on one hand.

"I have to be doing days' work. I work for someone else on a bigger farm. Now I am required to just carry load. We bring like pine and papaya and it's hard to be carrying load from so far. It's not a good feeling. I don't have a child or anything at all, but I have my brother and my mother," he said, noting that while he is transporting another farmer's produce, his rots away on his farm.

"My father died 2017 and I started running the farm. I stopped going to school about two months after, because we never really have the money. My father used to support me in school, this through the farm. So that's why I had to pick it up and carry on the work. My older brother helps me out, but it's my farm basically, because he doesn't live with us in St Elizabeth," he said.

Hudson says that the farm was the main source of financial support the family had. "This is what support the family because our mother not working now. So that support gone now, and we have to be looking for other means. And the one and two small opportunities we are seeing is not really much.