Mara farmer shows off jumbo sweet potatoes

Feb 28, 2015 News

East Bank Berbice (EBB) farmer, Roy Durjodhan, came out to New Amsterdam to boast about his extremely huge sweet potatoes he reaped on Thursday from his farm.

Composite picture: Roy Durjodhan proudly displays his jumbo sweet potatoes

The man, who has been farming all his life, hails from Mara, some 25 miles south of New Amsterdam, along the EBB corridor. He told Kaieteur News that while it was not a strange occurrence, those he reaped were the largest he ever saw.
“Often it happens,” he related.
Durjodhan said that the extreme-sized provisions are of such size due to the time they are left to continue growing in the fields. Then they are reaped “because there’s so much that you plant—you plant so many things—some crops continue to grow so that’s the reason they get so large.”
Durjodhan said that he experiences extremely huge cassava, too, from time to time. He said that while the large sizes of the produce is something to boast about, the markets reject the items, due to their size.
“That is not good for our local markets—the people don’t want the big-sized potatoes—they want the smaller sizes, so sometimes they have to cut them or so, because persons may only want two pounds, instead of five pounds.”
The farmer says that his main markets for the sweet potatoes (including these jumbo ones) are the chip-sellers, even though they do not buy a lot.
“Every two weeks, they buy fifty to sixty pounds, and that’s not fair enough to me, the farmer, because the produce gets left in my hands.”
Some of his jumbo cassava measure up to three feet in length and weigh up to six pounds.