Chasing a dream
Utech graduate launches ambitious agro-business
BEATING the sunrise every morning, Suedi-ann Hamilton makes a trip from Kingston to a five-acre plot in Ebony Park, Clarendon, where the young entrepreneur has embarked on an ambitious journey to build an agricultural conglomerate.
Believe Farms, the name that the 25-year-old conceptualised for her agro-business, after meeting strong resistance from her parents who wanted her to take a more traditional route to success, after she earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Technology, Jamaica (Utech,ja) in 2018.
“My parents wanted me to go to school and get a good job that pays a lot. They didn’t want me to go into business because they had the mindset that you can’t start out small and become big like a [Michael] Lee Chin or [Gordon] ‘Butch’ Stewart. They didn’t believe I could do it.
“My father wanted me to get a consistent job like a doctor or lawyer. I had the brains for it but I didn’t want to work for anyone. My dream was not to leave university and work for someone else,” Hamilton told the Jamaica Observer on a tour of her fledgling field of peppers Tuesday.
Last year, after completing a rigorous selection process with the Agro-investment Corporation, the agri-business facilitation arm of the the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, Hamilton was able to lease five acres of land to cultivate West Indian Hot Peppers.
She laughed at the irony that it was her father who sparked her desire to become an entrepreneur as he once made a life for himself importing and selling clothes to higglers in downtown Kingston.
Now, Hamilton has entered the business world, but unlike her father who imported goods to Jamaica, she intends to export agro-products to overseas markets.
“I got that entrepreneurial thing from my father. He didn’t want that for me, but I’m an entrepreneur. I think it’s in my DNA.
“I love business in general and I love food, so I always wanted to do something in food production and [when I was] around 19 years old I found myself getting interested in farming. But at the time I wanted to do cattle rearing. I still want to get into that down the road,” said Hamilton.
“But for right now, I want to turn this farm into a conglomerate,” said Hamilton who admitted that she is starting from scratch since she has no hands-on experience in farming.
“It’s just one month now since I’ve been in farming. But I got help from some farmers who are already in the game because when you’re new you can’t try to do things on your own. I did my research but I also try to get help from more experienced persons in the field.
“I also had to borrow a loan to do greenhouse farming, but when I really looked at it, I decided it was best to do open field farming and use the revenue from these pepper crops and okra to do the greenhouse than to spend all of that money,” Hamilton added.
The Holy Childhood High School alumna began her entrepreneurial journey out of a need to sustain her tertiary education after her mother migrated.
To send herself to university, Hamilton went into a route taxi operation and opened a hot dog stand after working long hours abroad on the work and travel programme.
“I worked 96 hours a week... for four months. I had to make my university tuition, I had to make my lunch money, my books and I had to make money for the taxi.
“I knew that once I went away I would be able to support myself because my plan was to buy a taxi. So while I was going to university, I had couple taxis on the road and I also had one of those Bad Dawg franchise as well,” said Hamilton, as she underscored that juggling working and school was difficult.
“I did that, but some things you have to give and take because sometimes while in class I wasn’t 100 per cent focused because sometimes my driver would call to say the car was in an accident and I would have to leave class and sort it out. I wasn’t a straight-a student but I tried my best to do well at the courses that were important to what I wanted to do. I was only an A-student with the courses that I loved, the ones I thought I needed,” said Hamilton.
After suffering losses in her taxi operation venture, Hamilton found her footing in agriculture.
“I realised that the taxi business wasn’t working out because the men were not so honest. It dawned on me that I couldn’t start out doing the big scale farming that I wanted but it was better to start small. That’s when I started to gravitate towards cash crops.
“My long-term dream is to go into greenhouse farming and pepper production because Jamaica is not exporting enough peppers. I eventually plan to get my own export licence. But for now, I am taking it one step at a time and working with the local exporters,” said Hamilton.
Already, the young businesswoman has landed a contract to supply peppers to a local hotel, and is working now to get local high-end supermarkets as customers.