PinoyEcoFarmer

Manage Insects on Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies. Ecological pest management employs tactics that have existed in natural ecosystems for thousands of years. Since the beginning of agriculture — indeed, long before then — plants co-evolved with pests and with the natural enemies of those pests. As plants developed inherent protective mechanisms against pests, they were helped by numerous partners in the ecosystem, for example:

Beneficial insects that attack crop insects and mites by chewing them up or sucking out their juices; Beneficial parasites, which commandeer pests for habitat or food; Disease-causing organisms, including fungi, bacteria, viruses, protozoa and nematodes that fatally sicken insects or keep them from feeding or reproducing. These organisms also attack weeds; Insects such as ground beetles that eat weed seeds Beneficial fungi and bacteria that inhabit root surfaces, blocking attack by disease organisms.

A crimson clover cover crop prevents erosion, improves soil, fixes nitrogen and attracts beneficial insects. By integrating these natural strategies into your farming systems, you can manage pests in a way that is healthier for the environment and eliminates many of the problems associated with agrichemical use. Knowing the life cycles of pests and understanding their natural enemies allows you to better manipulate the system to enhance, rather than detract from, the built-in defenses available in nature.

Another National Academy of Science report (1996), Ecologically Based Pest Management (EBPM), stated that EBPM “should be based on a broad knowledge of the agro-ecosystem and will seek to manage rather than eliminate pests” in ways that are “profitable, safe, and durable.” In addition to reducing pest damage, shifting your farming system to ecological pest management will bring multiple benefits to your operation. For example, moving from monoculture to longer rotations improves water-and nutrient-use efficiency. Cover crops planted to attract beneficial insects also suppress weeds, improve the soil, provide moisture-conserving mulch, fix or store nitrogen for subsequent crops and contribute to overall nutrient management goals.

Crop Rotation on Organic Farms : A Planning Manual. Crop rotation is a critical feature of all organic cropping systems because it provides the principal mechanism for building healthy soils, a major way to control pests, and a variety of other benefits. Crop rotation means changing the type of crop grown on a particular piece of land from year to year. As used in this manual, the term includes both cyclical rotations, in which the same sequence of crops is repeated indefinitely on a field, and noncyclical rotations, in which the sequence of crops varies irregularly to meet the evolving business and management goals of the farmer. Each field has its own rotation, and, consequently, each farmer manages a set of rotations.

Good crop rotation requires long-term strategic planning. However, planning does not necessarily involve identifying which crop will be grown on a field years in advance. Indeed, such specificity may prove futile as plans become disrupted by weather, changes in the market, labor supply, and other factors. Lack of planning, however, can lead to serious problems—for example, the buildup of a soilborne disease of a critical crop, or imbalances in soil nutrients. Such problems can result in an inability to meet the demands of a carefully cultivated market or in additional labor and expense. Problems caused by faulty rotation often take several years to develop and can catch even experienced growers by surprise. In fact, rotation problems usually do not develop until well after the transition to organic cropping. Since the crops grown by organic farmers are often different and more diverse than those grown in the preceding conventional system, the organic transition itself often rotates away from the previous crops and their associated problems. Most farmers are greatly tempted to plant excessive acreage of the most profitable crop or to overuse certain fields for one type of crop. Such practices can lead to costly problems that take many years to correct. The purpose of this book is to help growers and farm advisors understand the management of crop rotations; avoid crop rotation problems; and use crop rotation to build better soil, control pests, and develop profitable farms that support satisfied families.

Building a Sustainable Business: A Guide to Developing a Business Plan for Farms and Rural Businesses. Regardless of whether you are a beginning entrepreneur who has recently inherited a business, an experienced farmer who is considering on-farm processing, or a retiring business owner who is looking to pass on the farm, business planning is important. It is an ongoing process that begins with the identification of values and ends with a strategic plan to address critical management functions.

Like many rural entrepreneurs, you may have a strong sense of the values that drew you to the land or inspired you to begin a business. You may also have a clear set of personal and business goals that you would like to pursue “when the time is right.” But, if you’re like most farmers and rural business owners, you run into problems when trying to incorporate values and goals into day-to-day business decisions. How can you build a balanced and sustainable business—one that reflects your values and is successful—in the long run?

Unlike most other business planning tools, Building a Sustainable Business: A Planning Guide for Farmers and Rural Business Owners takes a whole-farm approach. You will consider traditional business planning and marketing principles as well as your personal, economic, environmental and community values—those less tangible things that are a part of your thoughts every day, but which often don’t become a planned part of your business. You will be asked to integrate values with business management practices throughout this Guide.

Building Soils for Better Crops: Sustainable Soil Management. This book is meant to give the reader a holistic appreciation of the importance of soil health and to suggest ecologically sound practices that help to develop and maintain healthy soils.

Building Soils for Better Crops has evolved over time. The first edition focused exclusively on the management of soil organic matter. If you follow practices that build and maintain good levels of soil organic matter, you will find it easier to grow healthy and high-yielding crops. Plants can withstand droughty conditions better and won’t be as bothered by insects and diseases. By maintaining adequate levels of organic matter in soil, you have less reason to use as much commercial fertilizer, lime, and pesticides as many farmers now purchase. Soil organic matter is that important.

Organic matter management was also the heart of the second edition, the authors decided to write a more comprehensive guide that includes other essential aspects of building healthy soils, such as managing soil physical properties and nutrients, as well as a chapter on evaluating soil health. In addition, the farmer case studies were updated and added a new one. The case studies describe a number of key practices that enhance the health of the farmers’ soils.

For hobbyists, serious farmers and retirees who need to shake off that sedentary lifestyle, what should be their guide in shopping for farm lots, now that these are sprouting like mushrooms all over the land?

Let’s ask the experts.

“Farm estates successfully integrate man-made, low-density development with the natural features of the site,” said Amado de Jesus, founding chair of the Philippines Green Architecture Movement. He added, “These are much more sensitive than regular land developments like subdivisions. Waterways, old growth forests, including indigenous wildlife must be respected and preserved while providing modern facilities.”

For agri-idealists, all farm practices should be ecologically sound.

You Want More? Continue Reading……..

An agrarian reform beneficiary in Daraga, Albay has found a “gold mine” in manually extracted virgin pili nut oil he himself developed painstakingly for six months shortly after attending a government-sponsored pili nut food processing course early last year, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) said Thursday.

Victor Ramon Goyena, 50, a civil engineering graduate, said it took him six months of experimentation before he finally perfected in October last year the extraction of virgin pili nut oil from newly harvested nuts. “The temperature plays a very important role in maintaining the nutritional potency of the oil. Only when no alteration of its nutrient composition can we claim it as ‘virgin oil,’” he said. Goyena added that he got hooked into this undertaking after attending a series of trainings on pili nut food processing sponsored by the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Albay.

You Want More? Continue Reading……..

Empower the landless and earn money from alternative farming. This is the plan for a relatively remote barangay. This is a scheme that hopefully will inspire other villages in Laguna and even beyond the province.

The village of Atisan is located where the Malarayat mountain looms over rolling hills straddling the borders of Lipa on the Batangas side, Tiaong in Quezon and Laguna’s San Pablo. The village is 500 meters above sea level and about 12 kilometers east of the City of San Pablo which is famous for her seven lakes.

This is slash-and-burn area where poor squatter families cut the trees for charcoal, firewood and lumber, scrounging for whatever they can to survive on scant harvests of ube, gabi, luya, the occasional bananas and sickly-thin coconut trees.

You Want More? Continue Reading……..

“Hands of a Filipino Farmer” by Paolo Zalameda

Statistics say that 70 percent of the poor in our country are in the rural areas, where agriculture and fisheries are the main sources of livelihood. But this is not because crops, livestock and fisheries are products that are inherently unprofitable. The rich in the countryside also mostly derive their immense wealth from these same products, but they are mainly the “middlemen,” composed of traders and processors. Indeed, one observes this inequity in farming areas throughout the country, where the most expensive houses belong to these people, often in stark contrast to the farmers’ and fishers’ humble abodes dotting the countryside. The situation suggests that the primary producers of farm and fishery products are not getting their due share of the final value of their products paid by consumers. Instead, it is the middlemen who manage to obtain a disproportionately larger slice of the value for themselves.

Interestingly, there is clear indication that Filipino farmers are worse off relative to their counterparts in other Asian countries. One gets some proof of this from cross-country data on farm-gate and wholesale prices, readily available from the database of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. In rice, for example, the ratio of farm-gate price to wholesale price in the Philippines has been averaging 47 percent over the past 15 years. That is, Filipino rice farmers ultimately receive less than half of the value of their product paid at wholesale. The same ratio for Thailand is 63 percent, while India has 62 percent and China, 94 percent. In short, Thai, Indian and Chinese farmers are able to obtain a far greater share of the final price of their products than Filipino farmers are able to get. Only Bangladesh and Indonesia have ratios similar to ours, suggesting that these countries have the same market inefficiencies that end up squeezing the incomes of their farmers.

Why do Filipino farmers obtain such low prices for the product of their hard work?

You Want More? Continue Reading……..