When 19-year-old Menen Ross steps onto the stage at the Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial and Food Show on July 31, it will be a bittersweet farewell, as the reigning National Farm Queen will hand over the crown to one of 13 young women who will carry on the competition’s legacy.

For Ross, a proud Clarendon native and a law student at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, the journey to the crown began in the dirt.

“From I was a tender age, my job, while my grandmother was rearing broiler birds, was to go into the coop, because I was the smallest one, to get the chicken so they could be killed,” she told JIS News. Her love for the sector blossomed when she joined the Jamaica 4-H Club while she attended Claude McKay High School. Though she initially tried her hands at home economics, she quickly realised that she belonged outdoors.