Strawberries Aren’t Ripe for Africa? His Farms Disprove That, Deliciously.

When Thierno Agne was a student who demanded a lucrative career, he told his agriculture professor that he was consulting the growing strawberries in Senegal.

“You will fail,” recalled the teacher’s warning.

He did not hear, and now, at 36, Mr. Agne directs one of the largest strawberry farms in the country.

Not only had he wanted to be a farmer. He had begun his highest education studying right. But then, he surprised his family by changing agriculture when he realized that there were already more law graduates in Senegal than the available works.

Even so, despite the excess of legal graduates, their change of focus was an unusual movement for an ambitious young man in a country where agriculture is seen a job for old people, without education or poor.

Mr. Agne has demonstrated, however, that agriculture can be a profession that requires education, orders both respect and remuneration as a lawyer and demands as much innovation as any high -tech entrepreneur is expected to show.

In a morning recently on his farm, on the outskirts of Dakar, the capital, Mr. Agne stomping in silence the rows of vibrant strawberry plants, verifying how his delicate harvest was.

This harvest would be sold in Dakar supermarkets and by road vendors, part of Mr. Agne’s mission to convert a luxury gift in a fruit of all.

“We want to demystify the idea that strawberries are not for Africans,” Agne said on his farm. “That they can be grown here, sold here, and the locals, especially our children, should enjoy them.”

His mission became more difficult. Until recently, he regained the support of the United States Agency for international development to hire seasonal personnel and train people to expand strawberry production in Senegal. That assistance ended in February as part of the destruction of the Trump administration agency.

But students still come to the farm in Bayakh, a village in the Thiès region.

Strawberries are Rama Diane’s favorite fruit, a Dakar student who recently visited one of Mr. Agne’s farms. But she had one in a whole year. Standing to the edge of a field full of them, she and her classmates were eager to try. Mrs. Diane appeared in her mouth and immediately began to make comparisons with the one she had last year.

“It was like sweet,” he said about the berry last year. “I guess it was imported.”

The unique flavor of its locally cultivated strawberries is a pride point for Mr. Agne. He hopes ultimately strawberry imports, which currently represent around 80 percent or Senegal consumption. But it is also determined to demonstrate that agriculture can be a source of good jobs in a country where they are very scarce: 20 percent of young people are unemployed in Senegal.

Agriculture can also keep young people at home, he said, instead of leaving the country for thousands every year, often risking dangerous routes for opportunities in Europe and the United States.

USAID had the help of legs with goals like the thesis.

In Senegal, where the agency, $ 27 million last year, the dismantling of such support will make young people feel desperate and feed illegal migration, according to Mr. Agne.

Several young people who advised had been considering migrating to the United States through a tortuous route through Nicaragua, but managed to change their minds. A large part of its launch was the success he had managed to find in Senegal, and that he had a valid American visa, but he was too square and satisfied at home to want to cross the Atlantic with her.

Mr. Agne grew outdoors and around agriculture, attending, often singing, his father’s mango trees. But he never thought that his future would be in the production of fruits.

“It was fun,” he said, smiling as he remembered his emotional bond with the banana and mango plants of his father.

But he saw his career away from the fields of his hometown, Tamacunda. He wanted to be a lawyer and follow the footsteps of his grandfather, a respected Muslim lawyer from Imán and the colonial era.

After completing his secondary level education, he went up to a train to Dakar, who only knew the stories of his beauty, vibrant life and charm of opportunities.

“It was the first time I left Tamacunda,” he said. “I lost myself and didn’t have enough money.”

A few days later, Mr. Agne appeared at Cheikh Anta Diop University and enrolled in a law program.

But when one of his teachers told him that more than 2,000 recent graduates from the Law School yet had work, he was very disappointed.

He deemed, he is returning to his hometown, worrying about his perspectives. But on that trip home, he first learned that his beloved grandfather had a leg not only a lawyer, but also a great farmer who supplied millet and corn to the French forces.

Upon returning to Dakar, the abandoned program of his law and enrolled to study agriculture.

The decision divided his family. “Some thought I was angry,” he said.

In a recent morning, Mr. Agne welcomed some 60 students from a Senegalese school, and by explaining the science he had requested to cultivate strawberries against probabilities, the biology teacher who brought students began to nod.

The teacher, Alieu Bah, said his students imagine agriculture as something that the poor do. “I want that perception to change,” he said.

It was the harvest season, and such organized visits to Mr. Agne’s farms were frequent.

With the earth softened by the recent irrigation, the delighted students went crazy for the fields, collecting ripe strawberries.

“I am very, very excited to be here,” Rama said, adding that it was very visiting a farm, and even more exciting, it was a strawberry farm.

Before Mr. Agne began Fraisen, the name of his company, which is the abbreviation of Fraise Sénégalaise or Senegalese Strawberry – Berry’s production at a commercial scale was unheard of or in Senegal. The warm and humid climate of the country of Western Africa and erratic rains were simply not suitable for it, many thought.

Mr. Agne himself was 22 when he first saw strawberries, in a school exchange in France.

Until then, the main cultivation he had seen was peanuts, the main export culture of Senegal and the millet, a cultivated smile for local consumption.

So what led him to hug such an unexpected harvest?

“It’s sexy,” he said, while moving between rows of the berry on his farm bathed in the sun. “It’s different.”

There is his experiment planting some strawberries on his balcony in Dakar, and they passed. He is interested in a plot of 2,150 square feet for $ 250 to start commercial operations. He won almost $ 6,000 with his first harvest in 2015.

Its second year, after climbing up to a little more than 5,000 square feet, benefited from around $ 13,000. That gave him the confidence to expand even more, 2.5 acres. But then their plants spoiled in the middle of the growth season.

“I think it was too ambitious,” he admitted. “Now, I take things step by step.”

Eight years after that hard lesson, Mr. Agne now cultivates a total of 12 acres in three fields, producing 50 tons or strawberries annually. Its plan is to acquire a 50 -acre field next year, which would place it in a small circle of large -scale agricultural producers in Senegal, where 95 percent of farms are small, mainly subsistence holdings.

He has trained hundreds of young people over the years, some of whom have become strawberry farmers, and others that process strawberries in juice.

“Now we are 50 of us,” he said, referring to an association or strawberry farmers he created. “Together, we produce 180 tons every year.”

With this own harvest production, strawberries are now cheaper in Senegal’s groceries and equally sold by street vendors in the streets. But at $ 9 to $ 11 per kilogram (a little more than two pounds), they are still unaffordable for many.

When the visiting students left, each with a strawberry box, Mr. Agne inspected their plants, which miraculously survived the tramples.

“I’m proud of what I have achieved,” he said. “I have put my country on the map of strawberry producers.”