Chaconia Medal (Gold) recipient Ramdeo Boondoo has earned the title of sweet potato king.

After years of experimenting with a host of varieties, he has settled at least five which he thinks are "sexy" enough for the market.

Boondoo, 73, a generational farmer, author and president of the Root Crop Farmers' Association, was awarded the nation's second highest honour on Republic Day for his contribution to the agricultural sector.

On Thursday, Newsday met with Boondoo at his sweet potato farm at Palmiste, central Trinidad as one worker was clearing bushes between beds of sprouting sweet potato vines and his son, Dinesh Boondoo, operated a tractor nearby.

From the tender age of 13, Boondoo, then a student of Todd's Road RC School had the foresight to respond to a query from his principal days after the country celebrated its independence from the United Kingdom in 1962 when he said the country could never be independent if it could not feed itself.

[caption id="attachment_978286" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Ramdeo Boondoo inspects the sweet potato plants on his farm in Palmiste. - ROGER JACOB[/caption]

His focus and vision over the next 60 years has brought him many challenges and successes to become one of the foremost farmers producing high quality varieties of sweet potato, cassava, eddoes and tania among other provisions on his 60 acres under cultivation under the umbrella of Uncle Ben Green Gate Farm.

Farming has been in his blood from an early age and Boondoo spent three decades working for now defunct Caroni (1975) Ltd rising through the ranks from a cane cutter to a supervisor.

Through a process of trial and error, Boondoo cultivated a host of hybrid sweet potato seedlings until he was satisfied that the shape, texture, colour were perfect.

Buyers are attracted to goods that look good, or sexy as he prefers to describe his tubers, and his provisions are almost ready made for agro processing plants which can transform them to fries, logs or other food ready for the pot.

The traditional sweet potato cannot tolerate the drastic changes in the weather pattern, and grow to shapes that are not too appealing to the consumer, he said.

The old varieties, after they are peeled, if they are not put in water they tend to go black. With his hybrid plants this does not occur.

He said to prevent this you have to use chemicals to prevent oxidisation but it made no sense to promote healthy eating and then be using chemicals.

His purple variety has the colour of a beet root.

"You want to eat the right thing, apparently that is what I am doing, I am 73, going on 74, I think it working."

He lives by the mantra that once you do a job that you love, you do not work and recalls those words of the late Ansa McAl executive chairman emeritus Anthony Sabga during a function many years ago.

"I don't feel tired when I done here... I am psychologically happy. There is nothing like a day off for me. Plants and animals don't take days off."

Boondoo says part of his daily routine is "talking to my plants