Agriculture Business Week

The Culinary Education Foundation (CEF), the social arm of the Cravings Group of Companies, takes a “greener” step by promoting that a zero-waste lifestyle is not only a way of life, but can also boost income and aid in the livelihood of people especially in times of economic crisis.

The CEF is currently conducting livelihood seminars that offer tips on recycling programs that promote unique and modern ways of starting one’s own business – using the greener approach.

The training programs, which began last August at the Kaingin Ecology Center in Barangay Pansol, Kaingin 1, runs every Saturday of the month from 9 a.m. to 12 noon until October 2009. All courses are scheduled at weekly intervals.

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Anyone who visits Ryan’s Farm at Barangay Mapaway, Tabuk City, Kalinga is impressed by the organic agriculture and aquaculture practiced in it by Jeremy and Corazon Ryan. He is a British mining engineer who settled in the country after meeting Cora, a biology graduate, in Baguio City in the 1980s.

The Ryans are well-known in the Cordillera Administrative Region as the organic farming couple. When asked how they got into it, they tell everyone that, it came about because of earthworms.

Cora learned the basics of vermiculture, the farming of earthworms, when she attended the First International Symposium-Workshop on Vermi Technologies for Developing Countries held at Los Banos, Laguna in November 2005. She applied what she learned at their 7-hectare farm that had ricefields, orchards and fishponds. With the initial stock of the African nightcrawler acquired from a local source, she ventured into vermicompost (organic fertilizer) production using organic materials available in their farm and locality such as rice straw, carabao and horse manure, banana trunks, kangkong and bignay leaves.

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