Why Is PH Agriculture Important? Because It's All Wrong!

MANILA: You want to measure monetarily how important Philippine agriculture is? On 11 April 2016, President of Inanglupa Movement William Dar said the budget of the Department of Agriculture should be tripled next year (Louise Maureen Simeon, Philippine Star, m.philstar.com). "We would like to more than triple the existing budget, (that will be) a good start," he said. "If there's P96 billion today, why not P300 billion to start 2017?" He is thinking of the Philippines being competitive locally and internationally. "We should develop more of the high-value crops, new hybrids, new varieties so that we can be competitive with the rest of the world."

In its Hunger Project, Rappler asks, "PH agriculture: Why is it important?" (Fritzie Rodriguez, 07 March 2014, rappler.com). My own outright answer is: Because nothing is right!

Even with rice, our staple food, we can't do anything right.

Now, look at the above image from the Rappler article: how many wrong moves can you see or discern? If you're not an agriculture graduate, I will let you pass. The scene is typical in the country. Being a farmer's son who helped his father in the ricefields in more ways than one, and as an agriculturist and a continuing scholar of sensible agriculture for almost 50 years now, based on the image alone, I can point out to you 7 mistakes I have personally observed of rice farming in the Philippines; I list them here not necessarily in the order of importance:

(1)     Too-close planting

(2)     Uneven planting

(3)     Too-old seedlings

(4)     Bare soil

(5)     Wasted water

(6)     Late planting

(7)     Delayed planting

Too-close planting. Instead, it should be wider spacing between seedlings. It should be at least 25 cm between hills. And yes, you must plant a single seedling in a single hill – you reserve the rest for replanting dead hills later.

Uneven planting. Instead, it should be square planting. That way, you give equal opportunities to the roots of each of the seedlings to grow optimally, thereby producing uniform good growth and therefore uniform good yields.

Too-old seedlings. They should be much younger. That's why he had to cut the top of the seedlings because they were too tall and would wilt more easily. Seedlings that are 2 weeks old or younger are the best to transplant, when they still have only 2 young leaves. They are less susceptible to transplanting shock, and they will recover from a change in location faster than older seedlings such as the ones you see above. Already, the seedlings are yellowing from the shock of transplanting; it's not lack of water because, as you can see, the soil is wet. Compare the seedlings in the green bunch that has not been transplanted.

Bare soil. Instead, it should be covered with organic matter, or mulched with compost. To build a compost pile right on top of the soil all over the field, I recommend rotavating the crop leftover and weeds and allowing the matter to decompose for at least 1 or 2 weeks before planting. The compost that forms on top of the field will store water and prevent evaporation from the soil.

Wasted water. Instead, the soil should be just moist, not wet like that. Other farmers have their fields transplanted in flooded condition, entirely unnecessary. They believe that flooding controls the weeds and the pests. If they rotavated their fields as I described above in the first place, there would not be any need for flooding. And no, irrigation is not necessary, as the technique called System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has shown since 1983 when it was developed in Madagascar and spread throughout the world by Cornell University (Wikipedia). If flooding controls pests, why is there so much spraying of pesticides anyway?

Late planting. If you look at the shadows, the farmer is transplanting at about 10 o'clock in the morning. Instead, it should be done early in the morning or late in the afternoon, to prevent wilting of the seedlings due to rapid loss of water from within the plant.

Delayed planting. Instead, it should be synchronized planting. How do I know? If you look at the upper part of the photograph, in the other plot, you will note that the rice seedlings are green, not yellow – it means that they were transplanted much earlier and have recovered from the shock of transplanting. You are exposing your rice crop to pests if you do not synchronize your transplanting with the other farmers – when the pests strike, your field will be the only one young and succulent enough as food for the insects, and then you have to spend so much for pesticides – the infestation was your own doing; the insects were encouraged by your late planting. Same problem with early planting. If you want to succeed in rice farming, you have no choice but to synchronize your planting with the other farmers in your community.

All things being equal, I say, if you followed my pieces of advice above, you shouldn't be a poor farmer.

Not so, according to Rodriguez' Rappler report cited above; the farmers are poor because of "exclusion, insecure land tenure, lack of access to technologies, or the resources are degraded," according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP does not explain "exclusion" but I can comment on the other 3 factors mentioned. The UNDP is incorrect, to put it mildly.

First, land tenure is not sine qua non, not absolutely needed for the farmers to prosper. Witness the farmers who have been receiving land for the landless from the government since the time of the benevolent President Cory Aquino – land tenure has not lifted them from poverty.

Next, "lack of access to technology" is incorrect. I have been a consultant in the last 2 years for an extension project with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), and we learned that the DAR farmers have been attending seminars, workshops and trainings on modern agriculture. They know everything, including over-applying fertilizers and pesticides. The only 2 modern technologies that they have known and have saved them a lot of trouble and pesos are the hand tractor (kuliglig) for plowing, and the thresher or, better still, the combine harvester, for threshing, because the combine wastes only a negligible part of the harvest, unlike when the harvesting and threshing are done by hand as in previous years.

And "the resources are degraded" – that I can attest to. That means that the soils are either infertile, or eroded, or acidified, or any combination of these. Your soil becomes acidic if you are always applying nitrogenous fertilizer and not much else. I don't think there are infertile soils anymore, because the farmers are always fertilizing their fields. But there is what I will call a hidden infertility, because the farmers do not conduct any soil test; if they do, with the soil test kit, they find out only if their soil is lacking in either nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) or potassium (K), the farmers' Eternal Triangle. They hardly use (or have not heard) of the Minus One Element Technology (MOET), which gives them a measure of a total of 6 plant nutrients, including NPK, copper (Cu), sulfur (S) and zinc (Zn). The MOET is a practical approach to finding out what plant nutrient is deficient in your field. For the MOET trial, you grow rice in 7 flower pots labeled as -N, -P, -K, -Cu, -S, -Zn, and NPK (Complete). The fertilizer formulations are already done for you – the packet, which costs P175 each, has complete instructions. In a few days, you can see with your own eyes if your soil lacks either N, or P, or K, or Cu, or S, or Zn, or any combination. You can buy a MOET packet from any PhilRice station, including that in UPLB.

Also, since there is now a Municipal Agriculturist permanently assigned and holding office at each municipality, there is no reason why farmers remain ignorant of modern farm technologies.

What the farmers lack is not knowledge of modern agriculture but lack of business-mindedness. They don't know how to plan. Our group taught practical farm planning to some of them, but it is not as easy as ABC. They have yet to discover economies of scale, for instance.

That's why we need to pursue inclusive market-oriented development (IMOD), which we are borrowing from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and which was generated when Filipino William Dar was Director General of that institute. I notice that the new DG, David Bergvinson, is avoiding mention of IMOD; I think it's because either the new DG does not believe in it, or he is not acquainted with agriculture because he is Big Data from the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation. Which is excellent for us, because we can appropriate IMOD for the Philippines, since it was a Filipino who husbanded it in the first place.

Inclusive in IMOD means you include the farmers as active participants in projects aimed at development, not simply as beneficiaries. Farmers have to work for their own good. You have to empower them, not make them mendicants or helpless without outside assistance. Inclusive also means there is a many-sided partnership to assist the farmers: public, private, philanthropic, business, civic, religious, non-government, and peasant. Arrangements will include, if you ask me, the nurturing of cooperatives whose boards are representatives of the partners in development. The farmers' coop can then take care of, among other things, credit, warehousing and transport.

Market-oriented means the wide-ranging IMOD partnership helps the farmers to produce as the market demands, including to open new markets, in association with direct consumers and not through merchants, so that the producers enjoy the values added from production to consumption. Such orientation will result in more than raising incomes – it will help the farmers rise from poverty and make farming sustainable.

Development means the whole village profits from such partnerships and farmer engagements. This is not simply growth in incomes but economic growth leading to social growth.

With IMOD, the Philippines indeed can more than "address its food security and nutrition issues" as the agriculture is developed. With IMOD, we Filipinos are not only after better nutrition here; we are after better lives in the villages. With IMOD, Philippine agriculture will prove to be hugely important not only to the rich merchants but more so to the poor farmers.