PinoyEcoFarmer

We were fortunate to be granted a chance to visit again the St Paul University Dumaguete (SPUD) Integrated and Sustainable Farm in Calo, Dumaguete City during our recent trip there. It has been six months since we were there and  I was surprised to see a lot of amazing changes.

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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.

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In the sleepy market of San Jose District in Puerto Princesa, Palawan lies a small garden planted to a variety of vegetables and herbs. The owner is an old lady who has spent most of her life advocating natural healing through the inclusion of fresh fruits and vegetables in the diet. Sylvia Dumo Pendon who calls her advocacy  the “Natural Diet for Disease Prevention and Life Extension” is a retired nutritionist who spent most of her professional years in Quezon City but has since moved to Palawan. She told us that moving to the province to pursue her passion of growing vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants was part of her retirement plan.

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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.

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“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?

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a lush ricefield

What does it take to convert a rice field cultivated the conventional way into an organic farm? One technique is to follow the system of Pastor Jerry Dionson of Humayan Ministry in Bago City, Negros Occidental. He has been helping the farmers in this rice bowl of Negros in converting conventionally farmed fields into organic farms.

Dionson and his farming colleagues have good reasons for converting rice fields into organic farms. For one, it is economical to produce rice the organic way since the farmers themselves are taught to make their own fertilizers and plant protection inputs. Usually, an organic farmer can grow organic rice at a cash expense of only about P14,700 per hectare. For another reason, the price of organic rice is much higher than the conventionally produced grains. The selling price is P60 to P80 per kilo.

As per the experience at the Humayan Ministry, the yield increases as the years pass by. In 2005, when they started converting their farms, the yield was only 75 cavans of palay per hectare. This increased to 87 cavans in 2006, 93 cavans in 2007, 115 cavans in 2008 and then 128 cavans in 2009.

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The pili (Canarium ovatum) tree is the source of the pili nut which is made into delicacies that are the pride of the Bicol Region. What most people don’t know is that the bark of the pili yields a valuable resin – known as “Manila elemi” – which is used in the paint, pharmaceuticals, printing and perfume industries.

However, despite the fact that 225,000 pili trees grow in the Bicol provinces, there exists virtually no resin harvesting enterprises in most parts of the region.

To help start a sustainable industry, the Department of Science and Technology-Forest Products Research and Development Institute (DOST-FPRDI) started three years ago teaching pili growers and farmers the scientific way of resin gathering. “The resin must be tapped the right way to make sure that the pili trees are not harmed and their yields are sustained. Over-tapping, deep tapping and frequent re-chipping can damage and eventually kill the trees,” explains FPRDI’s forester Arsenio B. Ella.

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With a year-round produce of vegetables, rice and other crops, people of Tara, a small outlying farming community of Himamaylan City in Negros Occidental, consider themselves very lucky. The harvests came even when last year hundreds of small farmers across the province suffered the brunt of a drought brought about by the El Niño phenomenon causing erratic weather . It is not so much because the Tara villagers are a hardy lot, according to Solflorename Puentespina, a former rebel priest who now works for a nongovernment organization.

A trail-blazing invention allows them to bring irrigation water up-slope from the Bingig River to their farms 10 meters above the source. The Tara Hydraulic Ram Pump System won for the Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation Inc. (Aidfi) the top prize of the 2010 BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) World Challenge, a global competition rewarding grassroots projects that give something back to their communities.

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The chief of the Bureau of Fisheries and aquatic Resources (BFAR) is encouraging fish Dagupan farmers to adopt the Isda’t Gabi (Fish and Taro) Culture, an agro-aqua integrated farming technology found to be technically practical and profitable for household-backyard food production. Dr. Westly Rosario, BFAR-National Integrated Fisheries Technology Development Center chief in Dagupan City, said they are implementing this project in Sto. Tomas, La Union and in the BFAR compound in Bgy. Bonuan Binloc.

Gabi-fish culture can provide a net profit of about P362,000 per hectare in five months, Rosario said. He said the integrated culture of isda and gabi results in increased soil fertility, reduction of weeding cost and optimization of soil use and farm space. He said there are fish species that are suitable for farming together with gabi like tilapia, African catfish (locally known as hito) and freshwater prawn (or ulang to local folks).

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There’s an enterprising balikbayan in Brgy. San Pedro, Sta. Rosa, Nueva Ecija who grows vegetables in sacks instead of in plots in the ground. She is Thelma Villaroman Zara who used to work for an aviation company in Anaheim, California.

Her duplex house has been attracting a lot of visitors not only from the neighborhood but also from nearby towns. That’s because of the very impressive display of vegetables that are planted in used sacks around the house. Thelma’s house stands on about 2,000 square meters of land. The big space around the house is mostly cemented and is used for drying palay during the dry season. When the area is not used for drying palay, it is not really productive so she decided to do something unusual. She planted different kinds of vegetables in used fertilizer sacks.

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