Agriculture Business Week

In areas where there is insufficient water, farmers may now ensure good yield from their rice plants by following the controlled irrigation technique (alternate wetting and drying) or by planting aerobic rice. Even in areas with sufficient irrigation water, farmers may also opt to decrease their water requirements by following the said technique without adverse effect on their yields.

Normally, farmers believe that continuous flooding is the key to good rice yield but this is not always the case as shown by the results collaborative studies conducted by Phi Rice, the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Controlled Irrigation(CI) or alternate wetting and drying technology allows ricefields to dry up for some time. The rice plants are irrigated only when the soil moisture near the root zone is almost gone.

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Posted on March 22nd, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Irrigation, Rice, Water. Comments: 4

Experiment shows that drip irrigation in onion can increase yield by as much as four times. This could make onion farming more competitive in the face of cheap imports.

Onion farming has become very erratic, says 44-year-old Joseph Eugenio of San Jose City, Nueva Ecija, who has been growing the crop for at least 20 years. One year, the price may be high but at other times, the price could be below production cost. The fumigate price in San Jose last April 3, for instance, was P6 per kilo. At this rate, if one is using the old traditional method of growing onion, the farmer could hardly break even. Thus, one has to try unproved techniques to increase production so one could make a profit.

Thus, when Eugenio was asked by Netafim, the Israeli drip irrigation company, to try the drip system, he did not hesitate to adopt the technology. He planted 400 grams or one can of Red Pinoy seeds in 2,000 square meters using drippers supplied by Netafim.

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Posted on March 19th, 2009 under Technology, Vegetables. Tags: Irrigation, Onion. Comments: 14

Farmers who transplant and direct seed rice may practice controlled irrigation to save water and farm inputs such as oil, fuel, and labor for water pumps without reducing yield.

A technology bulletin of PhilRice (Philippine Rice Research Institute) that will soon come out of the press states that from land preparation to the hardening of grains, Filipino farmers usually use 3,000 to 4,000 liters of water to produce a kilogram of rice.

However, rice consumes only – about 2,000 liters of water to produce a kilo of rice at 100 cavans per hectare. This amount is equivalent to 10 drums full of water.

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Posted on February 7th, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Farm, Farmers, Irrigation, Rice. Comments: None

A new technique in sugarcane production promises to be a most timely development as it could tremendously increase yields, especially at this time when some of the local harvests will have to go into the production of biofuel.

The technique is subsurface drip irrigation. It is not really new because it is now being done in India but it is something very new in the Philippines. For the first time in the country, the technology is being used on 12.64 hectares at the Gamboa Hermanos Multi-Purpose Cooperative Farm in San Carlos City, Negros Occidental. The sugarcane farm has a total area of 1,200 hectares.

Both the managers of the farm as well as the supplier of the subsurface drip system, Netafim of Israel, are very excited about the superior stand of the sugarcane crop in the demonstration farm. At the age of only five months, the canes already weigh two kilos each, according to Ted de la Torre, the agriculturist in charge of the  subsurface-irrigated crop. At this early stage, if the canes are to be harvested at the end of the fifth month, the possible yield was computed at 199 tons cane per hectare. That’s about double the usual yield of sugarcane grown under the conventional system using overhead sprinklers for irrigation. Surely, the yield could still increase tremendously since the plants still have another five or six months before harvest.

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Posted on January 8th, 2009 under Organic, Soil. Tags: Biofuel, Cane, Drip, Ethanol, Irrigation, Sugar. Comments: 5