Agriculture Business Week

The Bagobo-Tagabaw tribe in Barangay Sibulan, Toril District, Davao City has proven that organic farming works and can go large scale with high-end niche market.

Residing near the foot of Mt. Apo, the Philippines’ tallest peak, the tribe grows super sweet organic banana. Hernan Ambe, operations manager of Sibulan Organic Banana Growers Multipurpose Cooperative (SOBAGROMCO), said they are using the Bungulan variety, because it can thrive well under organic environment. The ‘fingers of the fruit grow up to 14 inches in length, longer than the Cavendish variety which is traditionally exported.

Ambe, a Bagobo-Tagabawa native and a barangay councilor, said that the Foundation for Agrarian Reform Cooperatives in Mindanao, Inc. (Farmcoop), a non-government organization established in 1995 to help the government implement the agrarian reform law, was instrumental in engaging his fellow natives to grow organic banana.

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Posted on November 4th, 2008 under Fruits. Tags: Banana, Mindanao. Comments: None

Bohol used to be a big importer of a lot of vegetables such as tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, squash and others mostly from Northern Mindanao. These days, some are still sourced from outside the province but that may not continue sooner than most people think. It won’t be surprising if the is and province will soon become an exporter of its own high quality vegetables, especially to the big market in Cebu.

The reason is that growing high-yielding hybrid vegetables is becoming increasingly popular in the province as more and more farmers are discovering that there is big money in growing such varieties.

The increasing popularity of high yielding vegetables can be gauged by the volume of sales of planting materials in the last few years. One seed firm, East-West Seed Company, for instance, has tremendously increased its sales in the last three years. For example, the company sold only P400,000 worth of seeds in 2006. In 2007, the value topped P1.2 million while this year the company is well on its way to sell at least P2 million worth of seeds. Of course, East-West Seed is just one of the suppliers of vegetable seeds in the province. At least three other seed companies are also selling their own varieties there.

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Posted on October 15th, 2008 under Vegetables. Tags: Bohol, Mindanao, Veggies. Comments: None

While the country’s agriculture sector is just about to draw up initial steps to combat climate change, another kind of change is emerging and slowly taking its toll on the country’s rice production.

This is crop change or crop shifting wherein farmers abandon rice farming in favor of a more profitable crop particularly banana. Such change in crop production gradually contributes to the declining rice-producing areas in the country particularly in Southern Mindanao.

FROM RICE TO BANANA
Data from the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Region XI revealed that from the 21,393 hectares planted to rice in 2005 in the region, almost one half or 10,047 ha were already converted to banana farms as there is a huge demand for the said crop in the export market. As of 2007, DA said the demand for fresh banana export is around 7.34 million metric tons valued at $475 million.

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Posted on October 14th, 2008 under Fruits, Other Crops, Rice. Tags: Banana, Farming, Mindanao, Rice. Comments: None

Many farmers in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) are practicing Palavamanan or integrated farming. Among them are the farmers in Barangav Sultan Kudarat, Pigcawayan, Shariff Kabunsuan. They are ever grateful that such a technology was introduced to them because if not for it, their farm income would not increase.

Indeed, these farmers have all the good reasons to say so since they are now earning much from vegetable production. “What PhilRice and JICA taught us is beautiful because it has helped us improve our livelihood,” says 55-year-old Maudti Ali.

Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) introduced the Palayamanan concept to the Muslim farmers through a technical cooperation project in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries of ARMM (DAF-ARMM). Among the agencies cooperating in the implementation of the project is the University of Southern Mindanao through its Pagkain Para sa Masa program.
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Posted on October 13th, 2008 under Rice, Vegetables. Tags: Mindanao, Palaymanan, PhilRice, Veggies. Comments: None

One of the important projects of the Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) at the University of Southern Mindanao (USM) has been the  introduction and promotion of dairying, but this was never an easy task as this farm enterprise was new to the intended recipients.

However, the Center’s director John Benjamin Basilio said that the project increasingly became a challenge as the center approached it from two prongs: institutional dairy production and the farmers’ dairy module.

Actually, institutional dairy production started much ahead of the dairy module. Since the center was programmed to get 80 head of imported Bulgarian Murrah buffalos in late 1997, two staff were sent for training at the PCC at Central Mindanao University in April that year.
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Posted on October 5th, 2008 under Livestock. Tags: Dairy, Milk, Mindanao. Comments: None

Northern Mindanao, particularly Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental, is where growing squash, particularly the Suprema variety, has developed into a year-round big business for farmers, traders and seed suppliers. Both small-scale and big growers are into growing this variety.

What could be the reason? Well, the farmers have discovered one variety that is preferred by consumers. This is the Suprema which was the first hybrid squash developed in the Philippines and released in 1987. Many other varieties have been introduced since then but it seems nothing can beat Suprema. It reigns supreme to this day.
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Posted on August 17th, 2008 under Vegetables. Tags: Mindanao, Squash, Veggies. Comments: None