Wealth in the soil
Rather than hit the sands in some beach resort, it felt refreshing to literally get back to earth as my wife and I spent part of the Holy Week in a cousin’s upland farm at the border of Siniloan, Laguna, and Real, Quezon. Joy Alcasabas, widowed a year ago after losing her husband to leukemia, turned to farming after years of putting her chemistry background to good use in a successful pharmaceutical manufacturing business that she has since passed on to her son.
Joy discovered the joy of farming somewhat serendipitously. What first led her to lease some logged-over land from the government years ago was the need to grow ilang-ilang for its oil extract that she needed for her cosmetic products. But that didn’t quite work out as planned; strong mountain winds adversely affected the flowering of her trees, and with it, production of the needed extract. To salvage her investment, she intercropped her ilang-ilang trees with high-value crops such as coffee, cacao, calamansi, abaca, and most recently, Korean pepper. To cut a long story short, she now finds great personal joy in farming, which allows her to provide gainful employment to a good number of otherwise idle men in the surrounding community—not to mention a good return on her investment.
I find it ironic that a chemist like Joy has turned into a successful farmer while I, a UP Los Baños BS Agriculture graduate, have had neither the time nor inclination even just to tend the plants and trees that my late father had planted all around our home. Filling what she lacks in technical farming knowledge, she found a friend in Marlon Talavera, an agricultural technical officer from neighboring Pangil, who, together with his wife Lisa champions organic farming in his town’s Barangay Galalan. Part of what has attracted Marlon to work closely with Joy despite her being outside his jurisdiction is a phenomenal organic fertilizer product that she developed, also serendipitously.
After noticing that the abaca trees in her farm thrived with hardly any care, her chemist’s curiosity led her to extract and analyze the tree’s sap. She found it to contain various elements and enzymes that worked wonders on other crops it was applied on. Leafy vegetables turned leafier and greener, calamansi fruits more than doubled in size, rice plants bore much more grain, sugarcane became thicker and juicier, and Korean peppers fruited more profusely. She developed a way to stabilize its active ingredients, and started bringing it to other parts of the country to test it with various crops. The Department of Agriculture has been actively testing the product, now officially registered with the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority (FPA). Prior to our visit, her organic fertilizer had just topped a dozen other products in a DA field trial on rice done in Talavera, Nueva Ecija, reportedly yielding a phenomenal 300 cavans of palay per hectare. Yesterday, she learned that the DA had obtained similar results with sugarcane in Dumaguete. And yet fertilizer cost is cut dramatically to a mere one-tenth of the usual P20,000 per hectare. Marlon affirmed a no less phenomenal harvest of 275 cavans per hectare in rice farms he has been overseeing in Pangil.
In charge of high-value crops for his municipality, Marlon also heads the Barangay Galalan Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Cooperative up in the hills of Pangil. He has turned the upland barangay into a certified organic farming area, growing various vegetables such as ginger, coriander, celery, tomato, pechay, cabbage, lettuce and so on. Their successful operation has earned a visit from Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica), which has helped with a 3-kilometer concrete farm-to-market road. Their produce is readily snapped up by Laguna Organic Farms and Products, which markets them in Metro Manila.
Like other practitioners I’ve met, Marlon swears that organic farming achieves yield levels no less, and even better than what they had obtained with chemical-based farming in the past, with very little cash costs. Any yield declines encountered are temporary, lasting at most three crops, he avers. Seasoned farmers have explained to me that the transition to organic farming involves rejuvenation from a state where “napapagod na ang lupa” (“the soil is tired”). It’s an interesting way to put it, but I defer to the wisdom of people who’ve spent the good part of their lives eking out a living from tilling the land. They must know what they’re talking about.
Our side visit to Barangay Galalan brought to mind my first direct encounter with organic farming seven years ago in Magsaysay, Davao del Sur, when I field-validated the town’s Diversified Organic Farming System (DOFS) for a Galing Pook Award. One clear advantage DOFS had was in the way it saved on cash costs, apart from the price premium organically grown rice fetches in the market. I found DOFS then to have earned the farmer significantly higher net income per hectare (up to P8,000 more). Moreover, farmers could forego the need to borrow working capital, cutting their dependency on trader-lenders who later take advantage by paying lower prices for the tied harvest. Early DOFS adopter Aling Lorna Silvano and her husband Mang Dado attested that they had not incurred new debts since practicing DOFS, and were about to finish paying off previously incurred ones. Organic farming had effectively liberated them from debt.
Now I know what I’ll probably do when I retire. My cousin Joy, Marlon and Lisa, Aling Lorna and Mang Dado have all convinced me there is great wealth in the soil—whether material or beyond.
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