Agriculture Business Week

The Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC) Foundation, Inc. recommends the following steps in producing our own seeds.

In Genesis chapter 1, 1 verse 30, God told Adam and Eve, “I give you every green plant for food.” And it was so. The propagation of plants is basically divided into two types: the sexual (or propagation by seeds) and the asexual (or propagation using vegetative parts or plants). Among the two types, seeds are the most important.

“Seeds are many things,” wrote Victor R. Boswell, author of The Importance of Seeds. “Above all else, they are a way of survival of their species. They are a way by which embryonic life can be almost suspended and then revived to new development – even years after the parents are dead and gone.”

No wonder, Filipino farmers who plant vegetables, beans, pulses and cereals are planting seeds for their next crop season. This is the reason why the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC) Foundation, Inc., through its several years of experience, is urging farmers to produce their own seeds.

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Posted on April 29th, 2010 under Other Crops, Special Report. Tags: MBRLC, Seeds. Comments: None

Would you like to use your kitchen leftovers and biodegradable garbage-like peelings of squash, banana, and pineapple; stalks of malunggay; unusable leaves of cabbage and pechay – as fertilizer for your vegetables and other crops planted in your garden?

It’s easy. Just build basket composts. “Basket composting is the process by which your home garbage, garden and farm waste and leguminous plants are allowed to rot in baskets which are half buried in garden plots,” explains Roy C. Alimoane, director of the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC) Foundation, Inc. in Kinuskusan, Bansalan, Davao del Sur.

Basket composting is a central feature of the, Food Always In The Home (FAITH), a vegetable gardening technology which the MBRLC has developed. “This type of gardening can provide the necessary protein, vitamins, and mineral requirements needed by a family with six members,” Alimoane says.

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Posted on July 29th, 2009 under Organic, Vegetables. Tags: Compost, Fertilizer, MBRLC, Organic, Veggies. Comments: 1

SALT is considered a diversified farming system. Aside from the hedgerows, rows of perennial crops such as coffee, bananas, and citrus may be grown in areas occupied by corn. The annual crops are rotated: corn is followed by soybeans or peanuts and then followed again by corn. “In this way, a farmer has something to harvest every month throughout the year,” says Roy C. Alimoane, the current MBRLC director.

SALT started to change thousands of lives in Mindanao and attract national notice after its introduction in 1978. “The response was overwhelming,” said Warlito A. Laquihon, the former associate director of the center. “People come to the center not only to get a glimpse of the system but to undergo training as well.”

After the one-week training, Talabucon returned home and adopted the technology he learned from the MBRLC. He also adopted other livelihood technologies in his farm. Now, his farm is teeming with various crops. “I am now happy harvesting the fruits of my labor,” he said.

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Posted on May 30th, 2009 under Farming. Tags: Farmer, Farming, MBRLC. Comments: None

Buencamino “Boy” Talabucon’s family left Manila when he was only three years old to settle in Davao del Sur. They were poor and so after graduating from high school, he started working by driving a passenger s vehicle.

After more than a decade of driving daily for 12 hours along bumpy roads, he quit and decided to become a farmer. A distant relative allowed him to till his 1.5-hectare land on the slope of a mountain on the condition that Boy remitted 25 percent of his produce.

With minimal knowledge on farming, Boy cleared one-fourth hectare of the farm where he planted corn. Initially, the harvest was good, but the production of his farm significantly reduced as years went by. He observed this as the soil on his hillside “was always washing away.”

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Posted on May 29th, 2009 under Farming. Tags: Farmer, Farming, MBRLC, SALT. Comments: None

A non-governmental organization urged Filipinos to plant more narra trees all over the country as it is on the verge of extinction. “Nowadays, the Philippines has only small, scattered and endangered remainders of the tree,” laments Roy C. Alimoane, director of Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center(MBRLC) Foundation Inc.

Narra was recorded as “vulnerable” in the Philippines, “threatened” in Indonesia, and considered “endangered” in India. It is probably now extinct in Peninsular Malaysia because of exploitation ~ of its few known stands. In the wild of Vietnam, on one hand, it has been extinct for 300 years.

In some of MBRLC’s reforestation projects, narra is one of the recommended trees for planting. “This nitrogen-fixing tree can grow to a height of 33 meters and a diameter of 2 meters,” Alimoane said.

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Posted on May 16th, 2009 under Forest Trees. Tags: MBRLC, Narra, Trees. Comments: 9