Rawle Clarke lives and works at Coverden, a community situated along the East Bank, about forty-five minutes’ drive from Georgetown. He has lived at Coverden for about thirty years and has been farming ever since he went there to live. He says, however, that he only “became a serious farmer about ten years ago.” We spoke, initially, under his house which shares the acre of land on which he farms. Clarke says the one-acre is part of family land.
It is not difficult to determine that Clark takes his farming seriously. His farm comprises neat rows of Scotch Bonnet pepper, an assortment of sweet pepper, bora, and carilla. These are his cash crops. The remainder, lesser amounts of sugar cane and other food crops are for home use. “Farming is hard work, but I love farming and it brings in the money,” Clark says, emitting a tone of deliberateness as he perforates the soil with a menacing-looking pitch fork. There is little sign of contemporary technology here. It is mostly about conventional, functional tools and about sweat. A cutlass and a determined hand, he says, still clears the land and the pitchfork still prepares the beds to prepare the seeds. It takes him an entire day to prepare three plant beds. If he used a hand-held plough the task would take about an hour. The limitation is “a question of money.” An investment intended to secure the funds to acquire the hand-held plough had fallen through.
