Agriculture Business Week

1. What is golden rice?
Golden rice (GR) refers to genetically modified (GM) rice developed to produce a carotenoid called beta-carotene. This beta-carotene becomes vitamin A when processed by the body and gives the rice grain the yellow-orange or gold color, hence the name “golden” rice.

2. How important is vitamin A to the body?
Vitamin A is an essential nutrient needed to keep the body, specifically the eyes, healthy.

Lack of vitamin A, also called vitamin A deficiency (VAD), damages the immune system, therefore, increasing risk to common bacterial and viral infections and rate of mortality especially among children. The weak immune system is usually followed by poor eyesight that can lead to night blindness, which may also result in permanent, partial or total blindness if the depletion continues.

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Posted on April 14th, 2010 under Rice. Tags: Golden Rice, PhilRice, Rice, Tungro, VAD. Comments: None

Meaning “strong” in Filipino, Matatag rice was named as such because it is resistant to diseases. This kind of rice was primarily developed to minimize, if not prevent, the incidence of tungro disease, especially in tungro hotspot area.

To date, there are four approved Matatag varieties, and these are Matatag 2, Matatag 3, Matatag 6, and Matatag 9. These varieties are proven to be strong. They are able to suppress virus invasion and multiplication. They are resistant to green leafhoppers, which are the primary carriers of the tungro disease.

“Under high pressure of tungro disease alone, yields of Matatag varieties can be below 4tiha but can reach as high as 7 t/ ha under favorable conditions,” said Dr. Gerald B. Ravelo, one of Phil Rice’s international breeders who helped develop the Matatag lines.

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Posted on August 17th, 2009 under Rice. Tags: Disease, Matatag, Rice, Tungro. Comments: None

Experience is indeed the best teacher. Moreso if one’s practice is as long as say, 53 years.

That’s how long Nemesio Cristobal of Villa Magat, San Mateo, Isabela has been into rice farming. A Gawad Saka awardee for rice-based farming in 2006, he attributes his success to his vast experience that advanced his talent and skill in agribusiness. “Many years of farming is still better than a few weeks of training,” he said.

Although he always produces a bountiful harvest with his wide know-how, he has encountered almost all kinds of rice pest infestations from simple grain loss to the complicated tungro infestation in his 2.5-hectare farm, and he likewise has tried many controls.

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Posted on May 25th, 2009 under Farming, Rice. Tags: Disease, Farming, Rice, Tips, Tungro. Comments: 1

Farmers in the rainfed lowland farms in the Philippines cultivating a total of 1.5 million hectares will benefit from the breeding efforts at PhilRice Midsayap as PhilRice plant breeders have already produced 10 advanced elite lines for favorable rainfed conditions. These advanced elite lines are called Raelines.

In Mindanao alone, some 231,444 hectares of rainfed lowlands are planted to rice and farmers are experiencing lots of problems like tungro infestation. In many of these rainfed farms, farmers practice asynchronous planting due to unpredictable availability of water.

The bigger issue, however, is all varieties thus far released for rainfed lowland cultivation by the former Philippine Seed Board (PSB) and now the National Seed Industry Council (NSIC) are susceptible to tungro, a very serious disease of rice. Thus, PhilRice breeders have focused their breeding efforts on the development of more adaptable rainfed varieties with tungro resistance.

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Posted on May 24th, 2009 under Rice. Tags: PhilRice, Raelines, Rice, Tungro. Comments: 1

Farmers who are not yet practicing integrated pest management or IPM may as well follow the innovators to enjoy the numerous benefits from it. It is a lot easier and cheaper than you think.

IPM may be defined as an agro-ecological method of sustaining the long-term benefits of rice production through the use of different techniques on managing of rice insect pests and diseases without causing any damage to the environment.

For a start, learn the interactions of the rice crop with biotic factors, the agroecosystem, and the crop management system to understand the destructive potential of pests, according to PhilRice experts. Remember that pest management is an integral component of rice production.

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Posted on April 25th, 2009 under Rice. Tags: Disease, IPM, PalayCheck, Pests, PhilRice, Rice Bug, Tungro. Comments: None

The cultivated Asian Rice(Oryza sativa L.), being a highly domesticated crop, has several major pathogens due to its long history of dependence on human beings. Early breeding efforts during the Green Revolution focused more on grain yield, and that was rightly so because of the pressing worldwide problem on poverty and population growth. In the past two or three decades, however, disease resistance has been included as one of the major objectives of breeding programs worldwide.

This will be the last in our series of major rice diseases. Previously we discussed bacterial blight, a major disease caused by a bacterium; rice blast, a fungal disease; sheath blight and sheath rot, the two sheath diseases caused by fungal pathogens. Now, we will discuss a disease caused by a virus, the simplest organism able to possess a genetic material.

Rice tungro is the most economically important viral disease of rice in the Philippines. Tungro is an example of a disease caused by a viral complex since two viruses are needed for transmission and infection. Hence, rice tungro is often described as a disease complex.

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Posted on January 27th, 2009 under Rice. Tags: Disease, Rice, Tungro, Virus. Comments: 1