Remembering Spring Plains’ ‘M-16 tomatoes’
Farm worker wishes Jamaica would create more value-added products from agri
Published:Sunday | January 18, 2026 | 12:09 AM
Forty-three years after then Prime Minister Edward Seaga announced that Spring Plains in rural Clarendon would become a high-tech agricultural investment, the property remains a central pillar of local farming. Once known as Agro21 and developed in partnership with Israel, the near-1,000-acre plain still supports scores of farmers who lease plots to cultivate crops for the domestic market.
For Annette Graham, a 52-year-old farm worker, Spring Plains is not just land. It is memory, inheritance, and unrealised potential.
“It had the biggest tomatoes that I have ever seen in my life. Never see anything before or since Agro21. Dem tomatoes we call M-16 tomatoes,” Graham recalled.
She was a little girl when Seaga launched Agro21, one of the most ambitious agricultural projects of the era and a key plank of the administration’s employment drive. Today, Graham works the same land her mother and sister once tilled, bending to pull weeds from a quarter-acre plot of sweet corn that forms part of a larger patchwork of crops.
26,750 jobs created
Graham’s family history is intertwined with the project. Her mother and sister, though a minor at the time, were among those who secured some 26,750 jobs created from a target of 33,645. Before the farm folded and underwent several transformations, Seaga said employment reached about 80 per cent.
Under Agro21, Spring Plains was converted from a former colonial sugar estate into a modern operation producing winter vegetables for the United States market. It also reared tilapia and cultivated macadamia nuts and other non-traditional export crops.
Decades later, Graham says the quality and size of the produce from those years remain unmatched.
“Dem is still the biggest tomatoes – salad tomatoes,” she stressed, “I have ever seen.”
She described them as resembling small pumpkins or large papayas, finally settling on the nickname “M-16 tomatoes” because of their size and “juicy” potency.
She wishes Jamaica could return to that level of production across all crops.
“We could even have by-products. We could manufacture and sell sliced tomatoes. We have tomato ketchup now, but tomatoes can do other stuff,” she said, continuing her work in the field.
“My mother and sister worked on the farm, and I was a little girl going to school. Sometimes they would get some of what was rejected [by buyers]. And those were still bigger than anything that is out there in the market even now,” she added, confident her memory would stand scrutiny.
Spring Plains now operates on approximately 944 to 1,000 acres, according to the Agro-Investment Corporation (Agro-Invest), an agency under the Ministry of Agriculture. Agro-Invest is tasked with promoting, facilitating, and managing agricultural investments, providing land access, technical support, and market linkages to modernise agribusiness and strengthen food security.
When Agro21 was launched in the 1980s, profiles were prepared for 21 outputs, including rice, corn and sorghum, soya bean, beef, dairy, cassava, pineapple, banana, coconut, citrus, forestry, orchard crops such as papaya and mango, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, ethnic crops, ornamental agriculture, winter vegetables, and apiculture. Some 270,000 acres nationwide were identified for expanded cultivation.
Graham recalled that sweet peppers, onions, cantaloupe, and watermelons were also grown at Spring Plains, supported by extensive drip irrigation.
“The rows were long. As far as the eyes could see were rows of produce. People from Race Course, Springfield, and other communities were employed here. Men and women who were employed. The pay was $80 per week. And the area has wells, so the irrigation was provided from the wells. Drought was not the problem,” she said.
Drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots and reduces runoff and waste, is one of Agro21’s enduring legacies. The method remains in use at Spring Plains and continues to support higher yields and water efficiency.
For years, successive governments have pushed for greater value-added production, especially during periods of surplus. That emphasis was on display at Agrofest 2025, where processed goods shared space with fresh produce. State agencies have promoted local consumption, exports, and initiatives such as the ‘Eat Jamaican’ campaign.
The Jamaica Business Development Corporation has supported converting peppers, honey, and roots into sauces, jellies, soaps, and candles. Through the Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority, the coffee industry trains farmers in value-added production, while the Coconut Industry Board and JAMPRO focus on high-return exports such as coconut and castor oil products.
TALKING TIME PASSED
Former Jamaica Agricultural Society president Norman Grant argues that the time for discussion has passed.
The Spring Plains model, he said, is deeply missed.
“I’ll share with you my thinking around coffee because I’ve been leading that cluster as president of the JCEA. But interestingly, that same model can be used to transform domestic agriculture,” said Grant, referring to the Jamaica Coffee Exporters’ Association.
“We should have built storage facilities where you can take them off and store them when there’s a glut and release them when there’s scarcity to normalise prices,” he explained.
With renewed talk of cold-storage facilities, Grant is calling for a complete reorganisation of the agricultural value chain.
He added that policy must be driven by farmers’ real needs.
“So we need to get down to a model where you say, what does a farmer need? The farmer needs seeds, tractors, [reduced] praedial larceny, [improved access to] marketing, funding, [and] extension service in terms of advice.
“There needs to be some out-of-the-box thinking. Get the contribution of agriculture up from six per cent of GDP to 10 per cent,” Grant said.
For Graham, that shift cannot come soon enough. She wants to see produce preserved, not wasted.
“What is not sold locally or exported,” she said, should “leave in bottles, cans, or bags.”
Reflecting on Agro21, Seaga once said it left a “legacy of a thriving, high-tech, banana plantation … exportable papayas and mangoes … the introduction of drip irrigation … and the beginning of a successful project of horticultural exports,” noting that its only disappointment was winter vegetables.
For Graham, those vegetables, especially the tomatoes, remain unforgettable.