PinoyEcoFarmer

Construction work has begun on the country’s first organic agriculture school in Zamboanga del Sur province.

Mayor Nacianceno Pacalioga Jr. said the College of Sustainable Agriculture in Dumingag town in Zamboanga del Sur province will help ease the poverty of farmers and help protect the environment.

“Dumingag is an agricultural municipality. The economy is being driven by agriculture,” he said in an article posted on the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines news site.

He said organic agriculture is his centerpiece program, contrasting with the relatively “easy” farming based on chemicals.

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Throughout the tropics people grow fruit and vegetables in their own vegetable gardens. Why do they keep a garden?

• It assures them good food at low cost. Fruit and vegetables are necessary for the good health of children and adults. They make their diet more balanced and tastier. By keeping a garden people are less dependent on shops and markets, where supplies are often irregular and prices are high. You Want More? Continue Reading……..

Poultry is an important farm species in almost all countries. It is an important source of animal protein, and can be raised in situations with limited feed and housing resources. Chickens are ‘waste converters’: they ‘convert’ a scavenged feed resource base into animal protein. They are therefore by far the most important species for generating income for rural families.

People raise chickens all around the world under widely varying circumstances. Their main objective is generally the same: maximum production for minimum costs and with minimum risks. The two main forms of keeping small-scale chicken are small-scale subsistence farming and commercial farming. If poultry is mainly kept for home consumption of eggs and meat, costs and effort can be kept to a minimum. But for a poultry enterprise to be successful, it must have a reliable market for its products and a steady supply of reasonably priced quality feed. It is important that feed resources are locally available.

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Trees are vitally important to people. They provide many products, including food for humans and animals, timber, fuel and medicines. In the tropical zone trees are much more important as food crops and cash crops than in temperate zones, where palms and large herbaceous  perennials such as banana are absent because of the cold winters.

Trees not only provide products, they also protect the environment and improve the living conditions around a farm. For example, they provide shade and shelter and play a vital role in preventing soil erosion and in sustaining soil fertility. All over the world forests as well as scattered trees are being cut down by people in their search for timber, fuelwood or land for other uses. Uncontrolled fires also destroy many trees.

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Abstract

John Maurice died in July 2002 after 50 years of tree nursery work in Israel. He had a way with plants and it seemed as though no woody species could resist being cloned by him. John had an uncanny feeling for creating a congenial nursery environment under harsh conditions and pioneered the propagation of ‘mini-trees’, including cultivars of a wide range of fruit and nut crops and selected progenies of species used in agroforestry.

Neither poor infrastructure, nor heat or drought would prohibit the movement of mini-trees to remote districts. If necessary the mini-trees could be raised to a conventional size for field planting in a simple nursery within the district. And to make advances in tree crop breeding anywhere in the world available to developing countries, John envisaged an international network for the exchange of mini-trees. John did not live to see these dreams come true, although he demonstrated that his vision was no daydream closer to home: he was asked to establish a nursery in the harsh environment of the Negev desert.

This paper is written as a tribute to John Maurice, in the conviction that his propagation methods deserve wider application, particularly in the Third World. The methods are discussed in some detail and scrutinized according to the tenets of crop science. They are also placed in the context of developments in plant propagation in general. John’s notions about the role of high quality nursery stock in engendering development in the Third World are presented. The operation of national plant quarantine stations and the Asian citrus rehabilitation programme are examples of activities that might benefit greatly from employing mini-trees.

Nurseryman and His Trees by Ed Verheij and Harrie Lövenstein

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Microwavable saba bananas, currently being exported to the United States, Australia, Korea and the Middle East, will soon make their way to the local market through a deal between Davao-based producer Sagrex Food Inc. and convenience storechain 7-11.