Fiji: young men shift focus to vegetable farming

In this day and age, it has become important for parents to instill into the minds of their children that education is important and is the only means of surviving in the big world.

Most perform well in school and create better lives for themselves by joining the workforce, for others, they have had to resort to staying home or looking elsewhere for jobs in order to earn a bit of money. For most children in rural areas, there is only thing that they can resort to and is not a problem for them to adapt to and that is farming.

AkarivaKoroi and Inoke Nauaroba working a the TTM Farm in Sigatoka

From a young age, these children go into the farm with their parents and are always trying to prove that they can plant food to survive. This is the option that 17 young men took a few years ago from Tavualevu Village in Tavua on the Western part of the main island of Viti Levu. Led by their group leader, Petero Natau the young men have switched interests from planting common traditional food like root-crops to focusing on vegetable farming.

In their quest to succeed in their new found interest, they applied for ten days training at the Taiwan Technical Mission Demonstration Farm in Nacocolevu, Sigatoka. With their application approved, they moved into the farm to begin their soul-searching quest to learn the best practical methods of vegetable farming.

Every morning is always filled with excitement as they cannot wait to get their hands dirty on the ground doing what they love most. Petero said that going into the farm at 7:30am is not a problem for them as they are used to the blistering heat that welcomes them out on the farm.

"Our age group ranges from 18 to 31 years and we have a strong understanding of each other as we are from the same village and we try our best to help each other out with given tasks on the farm," smiled Petero. With so many aspects of farming to learn, the group was divided into pairs to work on the different vegetable plots.

"The demo farm has a host of vegetables planted like cucumber, bean, eggplant, English cabbage, asparagus, tomatoes, lettuce and fruit trees as well," explained Petero. "So during our short stay here in Nacocolevu, we have learnt all aspects of planting vegetables and we intend to keep a record of all that we are learning so that we will be able to begin our own farm back in Tavualevu," he smiled.

The training course that the young men undertook includes land preparation, growth media and compost making, seedling raising, seedling planting, raised-bed making, fertilizer application, weeding, pest and disease control, trimming, and harvesting.

Inoke Nauaroba, 28, says the training that they have been receiving so far has opened his eyes to the realities of farming. "The more you sacrifice and the more you learn the better you will understand the technicalities of farming and it does not need a smart person to figure it out," he smiled.

"I have a farm back in the village where I plant bean, cucumber, okra, tomatoes, watermelon, pawpaw, peanuts and cassava and I always used the methods that was taught to me when I was young," he explained.

Inoke said that this was planting his vegetables without raising the plots first or just planting his tomatoes without using stakes. "Now this is a very important method that should be used for vegetable farming because if you don't plant vegetables on raised beds, during the rainy weather, the crops could be lost to minor flooding."

"Another technique that we have learnt is to plant cucumber on stakes with nets covering the stakes so that the cucumber plants can creep upwards and also branch out onto the nets to maintain it's quality," explained Inoke.

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