During the seventeen days in Jamaica, I had the opportunity to tour many different agriculture farms. The second day in Jamaica I got the chance to tour a coffee farm and see coffee grading. I climbed up tot eh top of the mountain to see all the coffee plants and saw how the plants are harvested. I got to try a ripe coffee seed and it has a jell around it that is very sweet. At the bottom of the mountain I saw a demonstration on coffee grading and tried some of the worlds best coffee for myself. It was so good I bought some. The second farm was a banana farm, where we saw the process from plant to packing. I learned what the different part of the banana plant are called. Did you know that one banana is called a finger and a "bundle" is called a hand. One of the most interesting facts I learned about banana plants is that they only produce one bundle which is about 26 hands of bananas then they die. Before the plant dies it does produce a daughter plant that will produce more bananas. After the banana farm, I got to tour a pineapple farm, which was my favorite. Pineapple is very new to Jamaica as a large producing crops so the company producing it is still doing research. Only one pineapple will grow on one plant so the company has to plant a lot of plants to produce enough crop. Did you know that pineapple plants can get sun-burnt so they have to add a pineapple sunscreen to the plants.
The last tour I got the chance to see was the sugarcane. I saw how it is produced and harvested. I was amazed by the fact that almost 80% of this farms harvesting is done by hand because it produces more yields and better sugarcane. While on this tour we got the chance to see the rum factory and see how the sugarcane goes from field to bottles. This tour was very educational because I had never learned about sugarcane before. I enjoyed my time in Jamaica and the tours were very educational because learning about different agriculture crops is amazing. I was very grateful fro the amazing opportunities this study abroad gave me!
