Potato farmer is the talk of the Agrarian festival

Michael Caruana, the young farmer who featured in an online video about potato exportation, was one of the main attractions at the Potato and Agrarian Festival in Qrendi yesterday. “I saw you on the internet,” was a common phrase he heard while explaining the harvesting process to keen festival-goers, standing in front of a tractor and other machinery used to grow potatoes. The 25-year-old has been working in the industry for as long as he can remember after inheriting the trade from his maternal grand-father, Luigi Muscat, who grew crops to feed his own family. Last year, he sent his first five containers, each weighing about 28 tons, to the Netherlands and this year he exported nine others. Mr Caruana’s venture gained popularity through a video uploaded on You Tube in March, which got some 160,000 hits. In the clip, Mr Caruana romanticises the cultivation of potatoes, going to lengths to explain that potato harvesting runs in his family’s blood, putting into words the authenticity of this home-grown, hand-picked vegetable that tastes of “the sea, the church and the sun”. The young man gained popularity overnight and, despite the initial criticism, he was soon commended for his...