Agriculture Business Week

He had been an elementary and high school teacher for 39 years. And now, after retiring, 61-year-old Rolando A. Sa-Unoy of Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo is a student again. But this time in rice farming.

Sa-Onoy loves teaching, but farming is his first love. At six, he started farming with his father. He took up education because there was no agriculture-related course in Iloilo that time. But his interest in’ farming never ceased even while he was teaching that’s why when he had the chance, he borrowed money to buy farmland.

He used to visit his 4-hectare ricefield every morning before going to school to see to it that everything was fine, for he wanted to ensure a good yield. His efforts, however, were not enough for his harvests were not good.

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Posted on January 7th, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Farmer, PalayCheck, Rice. Comments: None

Nestor Acosta, is the Gawad Saka awardee in the Ilocos Region who successfully transformed a 4-hectare former wasteland in Bacarra, Ilocos Norte into a verdant integrated farm all year round.

“Hard work and practical business sense have been the keys to the success for this hard working once landless Ilocano.” Well, he is still very much the same Nestor Acosta even as the 300 3-year-old mango trees that we saw during our first visit are now capable of producing at least 30,000 kg of marketable fruits. Wow, that’s a lot of money. Even at a conservative price of P20 a kilo, he can already get a gross income of P600,000.

Even at 52 years old, Nestor apparently is not yet ready to hang his wide brimmed hat and working clothes as a Gawad Saka awardee and an outstanding farmer-scientist in the R&D (research and development) consortium in the Ilocos Region. From what we saw during our recent visit, he is still very much on the run, so to speak. It appears that with the greatly improved soil texture of his farm, he continues to produce more vegetable crops even during the wet season.
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Posted on January 6th, 2009 under Farming, Vegetables. Tags: Farmer, Veggies. Comments: None

Palayamanan, a diversified farming system developed by PhilRice, is indeed a very practical way to farm. And more and more farmers benefit from it, especially nowadays when the cost of living is too high.

Among them is 62-year-old Quirico Ilisam of Dingle, Iloilo. He owns a 1.4-hectare farm, and for 35 years he used to harvest just around 110 cavans(cav) per cropping. He finally adopted Palayamanan in November 2007. He allotted 1 ha to rice and the remailing to vegetables such as tomato, eggplant, squash, string beans, sponge gourd, okra, alugbati, gabi and sweet and hot pepper.

“Unlike rice that takes [about[ four months to get an income, some vegetables can be sold after just a month,” Quirico said.
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Posted on January 4th, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Farmer, Palayamanan, PhilRice, Rice. Comments: None

Farmers in Ilocos Norte normally have small farms, 0.75 hectare (ha) on the average. Seldom are there farmers with more than 3 ha. But for hard working farmers, farm size is not of a constraint to successful farming even under the semi-arid conditions of the Ilocos provinces.

Compared to most farmers, Onofre Balantac of Barangay Sulongan, Pasuquin and Honorio dela Cruz of Barangay San Guillermo, San Nicolas are relatively young at 38 years old. However, both of them are already classic examples of the many farmers in Ilocos Norte who derive a satisfactory income from their small farms. This is because Onofre and Honorio are innovators. They always seek for new information and technologies that can help improve their farm productivity and income.

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Posted on January 1st, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Entrepreneurs, Farmer, Farming, Garlic, Rice. Comments: None

There’s probably no sweeter reward for extensionists than to find one day that a once stubborn farmer has turned into one of the foremost advocates of the new technology.

Lito Sadiaran, 52, of Barangay Pias Norte, Currimao, Ilocos Norte, was considered a stubborn farmer until he got the PhilRice Palayamanan project in 2001 and subsequently in the Technical Cooperation Project of PhilRice and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) called TCP 3.

“I would say a lot of baloney things before whenever somebody tried to teach me something new,” Lito said.

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Posted on December 30th, 2008 under Farming, Technology. Tags: Farmer, Technology, Veggies. Comments: None

He’s an undergraduate and he doesn’t have a land, but he earns well.

It’s because Benigno Endonela maximizes his farm resources well by practicing integrated farming or Palayamanan in the one-hectare farm that he rents in Barangay Ariman, Gubat, Sorsogon.

Like his father who rented and cultivated the same farm for 38 years, Benigno also believes that there’s money in farming. So when he succeeded the tenancy of the farm in 2003, he never had second thoughts on following his father’s footsteps.
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Posted on December 23rd, 2008 under Farming. Tags: Farmer, Palayamanan. Comments: 1

What makes a farmer wiser? Many would say that it is his experience. But for a farmer in Barangay Kadayonan in Balindong, Lanao del Sur, it was his receptiveness to new technology that made him wiser and enabled him to harvest 120 cavans per hectare from a native rice variety last year.

When asked how he did it, forty-four year-old Ali Tomara said that he was able to obtain a high yield from Batugan or Tripoli, a native variety which produces slightly aromatic, soft rice, by adopting the new farming technologies he learned from the Farmers’ Field School (FFS). This was the major activity of the fourth Technical Cooperation

Project (TCP 4) of PhilRice and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) which was implemented by the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries of the ARMM, local government units, Mindanao State University, and University of Southern Mindanao.

Ali is an experienced farmer; for years, he has been planting his 2-hectare farm with rice in the rainy season and with vegetables in the dry season. What’s good about him is that despite the knowledge he had from his many years of farming, he recognizes his limitations and compensates these by adopting new farm technologies he learned from seminars like the FFS.

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Posted on November 27th, 2008 under Farming, Rice, Technology. Tags: Farmer, Farming, PhilRice, Rice. Comments: None

As farmers worry about how to manage their postharvest wastes, rice straw in particular, a study shows that these wastes, if properly managed, can lessen their problesm on high fertilizer cost in rice farming.

Just consider this: 5 tons (t) of rice straw can save 1-2 bags of urea, 2-3 bags of muriate of potash, and 1/2 bag of solophos.

RICE STRAW BURNING IS NOT GOOD
A harvest of 1 ton grain produces 1 t of rice straw. This gives us an idea of how much rice straw stays in the field after every harvest.

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Posted on November 23rd, 2008 under Rice. Tags: Farmer, Fertilizer, Rice. Comments: 1

In the bag of feed comes a handful of hope for Mindanao to rise to its full potential. Senator Mar Roxas, champion of real people’s real concern takes pride in bagging a hog feed during the inauguration of Pilmico Foods Corporation’s new feed mill facility at Kiwalan, Iligan City last September 4, 2008.

In his speech during the inauguration, he said, “There is hope in Mindanao”, words from a senator who envisions economic development in the south.

Also, in his brief TV interview he told ABS-CBN that what is, lacking in Mindanao is capital and investors to establish business in the area thereby creating more jobs, more income for the people, and if Mindanao is to have ecozone free port like what Subic and Clark have then this would be an added incentive to the investors to put up business.

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Posted on November 12th, 2008 under Livestock, Rice. Tags: Farmer, Feedmill. Comments: None