At 25, Minerva Collins already has five hands-on years of farming under her belt. It is not as if she ‘cut her teeth’ on living off the land. A native of the village of Nurney, she had attended the Central Corentyne Secondary School, undergone a routine academic ‘journey’ and afterwards secured employment at a local garment factory. That, she figured, was one of the routine options open to young women.
Nor was there, as far as we could tell, any sudden burst of inspiration that caused her to ‘see the light’. What hovered constantly, however, was the spectre of her father, Conrad, who had long ago decided that a 10-acre plot of land aback of Nurney would be the source of his own income. So that for Minerva, the option of farming was within her ‘hand reach’ so to speak… and she took it.
Conrad Collins himself had been making a living from the land from much earlier, though he concedes that it was only over the past five years that he has settled seriously into the pursuit. He has pursued cattle and cash crops and is beginning to recognise uplifting windows of opportunity in ‘the land’.
