Doing Right With Rice – A Few Roman Catholic Lessons From Madagascar

If you look at this Rappler photo of a single farmer planting rice, it looks like it’s not a big deal and he doesn’t mind being alone in his work.

He should! He is doing it all wrong! All Filipino farmers are doing it all wrong!

I mean, transplanting rice. Unless you are using now the transplanter, you are going the wrong way of transplanting rice.

The man is transplanting rice wrongly, and he does not realize it. And probably neither do you!

It was only early this morning, Tuesday, 07 July 2020 Manila time when I Roman Catholic realized that we Filipinos have been planting rice all wrong since the beginning. Well, we inherited it from the Chinese, from whom we learned rice farming, plowing, etc. The Chinese are smart when they are, but not in this one.

So, here are My 5 Rice Lessons for you today, rich, poor, doctor, farmer:

1.     PS. 

2.     PS.

3.     PS.

4.     PS.

5.     PS!

(1)   Plant Singly.
Plant 1 seedling per hill, no more. This is a lesson from the System of Rice Intensification, SRI, compiled over the years by Roman Catholic Fr Henri de Laulanie SJ that he developed in Madagascar, where only 1 individual seedling is pushed  into a hill and no more. This is for maximum growth of the seedling, that is, in producing the necessary tillers for grains production. This is contrary to the usual practice of bunch transplanting, which results in too few tillers – so? Low yield.

(2)   Plant Squarely.
Plant each seedling equidistant from each other. Again, a lesson from the Catholic SRI. Use either 15 x 15 cm or 20 x 20 cm spacing. Each seedling in those squares will grow robust and to its maximum, because of the available wide space between competing roots from opposite hills. Robust seedlings will grow robust tillers – equals robust harvests! It is the Lesson of the Tillers that Filipino farmers have not learned  from the Catholics! The fastest way to plant squarely? Use a mechanical transplanter.

(3)   Plant Soon.
Plant when the seedling is still very young, 2 weeks old, another lesson from us Catholics. The usual Filipino farmer practice is to plant 1-month old seedlings. Too old! There is always a transplanting shock, and the young ones can take it without much trouble, recovering fast, unlike older seedlings. I wonder why Filipino farmers have not seen this with their own eyes?!

(4)   Plant Seed.
Plant, don’t transplant – plant the seeds directly, not raise them on a seedbed first and then transplant. No transplanting shock, no additional labor – the seed grows into a seedling, and the seedling grows into a plant without much ado. Why do rice seedlings grow yellow a few days after transplanting? That is transplanting shock – they are trying to recover their health.

(5)   Plant Smartly.
Plant using a seeder or a transplanter. That’s how to get square planting automatically. This is to avoid having to measure out all those squares in the field.

This is a Roman Catholic speaking!@517

San Jose City – Kalasag As Shield Against Fungi, Shield Against Poverty

Noel Ocampo Reyes shares on Facebook that a “Co-op Grows 800 Tons Onion For Food Chain, Makes Own Fungicide[1]!” Excited, yes. That’s Zac Sarian enthusiastically writing (29 June 2020, zacsarian.com) about members of the Kalasag Farmers Producers Cooperative preparing their own fungicide that they call Trichoderma – actually the name of the fungus – that they spray against all kinds of fungal enemies of hectares upon hectares of onion in San Jose City in Nueva Ecija. Zac tells us the Trichoderma initially used came from PhilRice in Nueva Ecija, free for the asking.

Before I forget. Zac mentions that Kalasag is growing onion “for a big fastfood company” – in 2012, already I knew that to be the Jollibee chain of companies. That’s one of the secrets of a good coop: Get a marketing contract with an institutional consumer and you are good for life!

Been there, done that 8 years ago. I visited that place early 2012 to interview and photograph the Kalasag members for the book I was producing – writing, photographing, desktop publishing – to help celebrate the Silver Anniversary of the Agricultural Credit & Policy Council, ACPC (which is under the Department of Agriculture), when Jovita Corpuz  was Executive Director – the book cover I designed you can see inset above, with Kalasag farmers on their fields harvesting. Note that Frank H is showing white onions while Zac Sarian is showing red onions. Both Ilocanos, we have quite different “noses for news” – Frank goes for the producers while Zac goes for the product.

The ACPC book I produced in 2012 titled The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable and subtitled Celebrating 25 Years Of The ACPC, mainly featured the operations of successful coops. 8 years later, here I am proselytizing for more multipurpose coops that are more business-like and which I refer to as Super Coops.

Yes, I am emphasizing more producers rather than products. I am a board member of the Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative in my hometown Asingan in Pangasinan, and I know that such types of coop hold much promise as farmers’ friends in terms of helping them rise from poverty and staying up there! Nagkaisa is not yet my ideal Super Coop – while Kalasag of San Jose City by all means already is a Super Coop, able and equipped to grow, process, store, transport and market the onions for members. (There are 45 members, according to NRT 2011[2].)  In 2012, I learned each Kalasag farmer earned at least P1 million/ha!

That’s what a Super Coop is for: Helping members cultivate business-mindedness so that they can rise from their poor stations in life to one of prosperity – whether they go for white or red onion, whether they use a natural product as fungicide or not. It’s the cooperative working as one force for all members, not just for a few investors.

We must grow tons & tons of produce – simultaneously, we must cultivate a million farmers via Super Coops like Kalasag who will help them escape from poverty, improve their lives, and sustain themselves!@517

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[1]https://zacsarian.com/co-op-grows-800-tons-onion-for-food-chain-makes-own-fungicide/?fbclid=IwAR1cPMwFlrAj-
qoB3dkrTUFDYSaEDSUTc2HX6y_j4Sq5lMAW0sMMpMuvRw
[2]https://www.slideshare.net/MABSIV/bridging-farmers-to-the-jollibee-value-chain-program

On Digital Knowledge & PH Agriculture – I Love You, Peter Wallace!

On Facebook, PH Secretary of Agriculture William Dar shares “Peter Wallace, noted columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.net, on agriculture” as saying:

Everything we do today is digitized. So I consider the Department of Information and Communication Technology as with the Department of Agriculture, the most important departments in the government today.

100% I agree as an intense blogger of 13 years and a professional agriculturist!

Inset is my Windows 10collage, with Mr Dar at the bottom right, dated 2018. As an indefatigable blogger, I began digitizing data & information in practical agriculture for the world earnestly in January 2007 when he hired me as international consulting writer of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, when he started his 8^thyear as Director General of ICRISAT, which was/is based in India. I began my aggie science digitization with the blog iCRiSAT Watch.

I am extremely glad Mr Wallace appreciates digitization of knowledge, especially agriculture. The DICT and the DA should make a formidable team in bringing digital knowledge anywhere in the Philippines anytime under any circumstances!

Mr Wallace wants PH agriculture to be “preeminent,” saying that “The production of food efficiently and cheaply must be of highest priority.” He says No to agrarian reform – and so do I, son of a farmer. He points out to problems in production and infrastructure.

And then about the men in the middle:

There’s also the problem of too many middlemen doing little but capturing the bulk of the profits because the logistics is not there.

Confidently, Mr Wallace says, “The Philippines should not only be supplying all the food Filipinos need, but also be a major supplier to the world.” But right now it has to buy rice when it has to augment the supply. He says, “One thing the Duterte administration has done that deserves high credit is the freedom to buy rice at competitive prices.” That reminds me of Mr Dar saving PH some P2.2 billion by publicly bidding fertilizer importation (see my essay, “Marlen V Ronquillo – I Agree With You, “In A Prostrate Sector, Vileness Does Not Rest[1],” 29 June 2020, THiNK Journalism, Digital). Mr Ronquillo was questioning the bidding and I was questioning his questioning!

#5, Information Technology – Mr Wallace says:

Paper has to go as an electronic world takes over. The preeminence the Philippines has attained with call centers can be expanded into more sophisticated services and production of the hardware, and make the country a leader as we have the skills.

And yes, we Filipinos have the digital minds! Please note my blog’s name is THiNK Journalism, Digital. Mr Dar himself has his own 17-year old digital idea: Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture – and I have written a digital book to implement it.

So, when finally we can convince the President and Congress to provide the funds to digitize Philippine agriculture from soil to spoon:

I at 79 will surely be there:
(1) helping transform technical language to popular, and
(2) blogging with all my heart!@517

 

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[1]https://ithinkjournalism.blogspot.com/2020/06/marlen-v-ronquillo-i-agree-with-you-in.html

Ilocano Pinakbet Has A Pest Management Lesson For You!

Main image: Locusts big and small. My screen capture of a video of a locust swarm wanting to feast on an unidentified cornfield, video by a non-Filipino shared on Facebook by SRO[1]. My reaction was, in 1 word: “Monocropping.” It is monoculture that brings the plague of pests anywhere in the world.

I meant, if a few locusts find a large tract of cornfield, they will feast on it and grow in numbers – and attack the next cornfield in greater number, and so on and so forth. A law of Mother Nature.

In monoculture, there is no balance of nature. Why don’t we have swarms of locusts in the Philippines when we also grow corn? Because we don’t have very wide fields of corn like those in Africa (where the above video probably comes from).

Pranav Baskar has written, “Locusts Are A Plague Of Biblical Scope In 2020. Why? And ... What Are They Exactly[2]? ” (14 June 2020, NPR). Among other things, he says, ”Hundreds of millions of the insects have arrived in Kenya, where they're destroying farmland" –

Titanic swarms of desert locusts resembling dark storm clouds are descending ravenously on the Horn of Africa. They're roving through croplands and flattening farms... unprecedented threat to food security.

We don’t have to live in Africa to learn the Lesson of the Locusts: Look for natural enemies of the locusts. The Department of Agriculture of Australia[3] has a list of such natural enemies: wasps, flies, mites, nematodes, protozoans, fungi, bacteria and viruses, predators.

The same story with diseases that devastate your rice or onion or sugarcane or whatever crop. If you don’t have crops that encourage the multiplication of the natural enemies of those pests and diseases, you get only the pests and diseases!

To avoid having to resort to insecticides and fungicides, farmers have the choice of multiple cropping, intercropping or simply trap cropping – except that these are not being emphasized by farm technicians, and I have yet to read my alma mater, UP Los Baños underscoring such types of cropping.

My favorite “model” for a farm that enjoys a natural balance of populations of insects, worms and so on is the planting in same field of the Pinakbet Vegetables: tomato, eggplant, string bean, okra, and ampalaya (bitter gourd). That is to say, the insects that love the tomatoes have to contend with the insects that love the eggplant and those that love the string bean and so on – no, they cannot multiply to an infestation population.

About the pinakbet, it is cooked with a little bit of pork, preferably belly. The Ilocano pinakbetis short for pinakebbet, made to shrink – each of the ingredients in that mix is made to shrivel by cutting only tips of vegetables and not opening the pot while cooking is going on. That’s keeping your health inside those things. (Pinakbet image from Busy Beta[4], where the squash makes it a Tagalog pinakbet.)

The Ilocano pinakbet is a lesson in healthy cooking – but first, healthy farming!@517

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[1]https://www.facebook.com/100039782648500/videos/273557047313715/
[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/14/876002404/locusts-are-a-plague-of-biblical-scope-in-2020-why-and-what-are-they-exactly
[3]https://www.agriculture.gov.au/pests-diseases-weeds/locusts/about/about_locusts4]https://busy.org/@zoeroces/pinakbet-of-ilocano

Farmers & “The New Gains Revolution”

To the Facebook sharing by Roberto Acosta of John Berthelsen's “Scientists Renew The Green Revolution[1]”, 22 June, my comment was:

Still short – revolutionizing only the crop, not the farming where the farmer gets proper rewards for his labor – sans usurers, sans merchants.

No: “New Grains Revolution.”
Yes: “New Gains Revolution.”
Small Change, Big Change!

Thanks but no thanks to Bill Gates who funded the generation of Green Super Rices initially at IRRI in Los Baños, Laguna. I was Freshman at the UP College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, when IRRI was born, so you can say I grew up with IRRI in the fields of agriculture.

No John, we are past the need for a New GrainsRevolution and now need a New Gains Revolution!

Don’t get me wrong, John. I love what is called Green Super Rice, GSR (above image); in fact, I praised it 5 years ago (“Green Super Rice[2],” 25 June 2015, INA DAGA). This was about Indian farmer Asha Ram Pal of Uttar Pradesh who obtained a yield of 4.5 tonnes, where before that field used to give him only 1 tonne! It was the GSR.

Yet, what are 3.5 more tonnes of rice grains per hectare for if the gains are not capable of releasing the rice farmer from poverty?!

So you see, John, I knew about the New Grains Revolution, my term, at least 5 years ago. Yet, what we need today is the New Gains Revolution!(above inset image of hands and money from Golden Mastermind[3]).

John, in the Philippines, as the son of a farmer, I knew even when I was that high that the usurer was the enemy of the farmer in our rural village of Sanchez in Asingan, Pangasinan in Central Luzon, Philippines. One other enemy of the farmer was the merchant – because of debts, the rice farmer had to sell his harvest at harvest time, and that’s a heaven-sent time for the merchant, who would then offer a measly sum for the grains, and the poor farmer had to accept the offer because he would have nothing else. Secretary of Agriculture William Dar knows all these and what needs be done

So, the times of plant breeders are past, John. We are now looking for people who would encourage farmers to become members of a multi-purpose cooperative that would manage the aggie businesses of the farmers. This type of coop I call Super Coop, of which I first wrote 6 years ago (see my essay, “Brain Gain[4],” 01 June 2014, Frank A Hilario).

John, what we are going after now is not only more grains but more gains for each farmer to rise above poverty.

What we need to cultivate now, John, is not any new variety or crop but a new variety of farmer. And no, John, the farmer in The New Gains Revolution need not go to school, need not be young, and need not be a landowner. He needs only be a thinker of more gains and less grains!@517

 

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[1]https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/scientists-renew-the-green-revolution?fbclid=IwAR0-JUSVIP-QVFbxAc7mw4BWYIM2cyKQmsR5wZsMzqHXCut5zwFAB1zu8x4
[2]http://inadaga.blogspot.com/2015/06/green-super-irri.html
[3]https://blog.goldenmastermind.com/money-quotes/
[4]http://frankahilario.blogspot.com/2014/06/brain-grain.html

Why In PH Agriculture, Science Is Not Helping Journalism, & Journalism Is Not Helping Farming

The title of Bruce Tolentino’s Facebook sharing above is, “NEDA Urges Intensified Agricultural R&D To Improve Food Security.” It looks innocent, but it is not.

The source of the news item is the document titled “Inter-Agency Task Force Technical Working Group For Anticipatory And Forward Planning” – you can see that the headline is actually saying that it is NEDA and NEDA alone that has seen the need for intensified aggie R&D! You are looking at the usual PH journalistic hyperbole to catch your attention as a reader.

Actually, it is not NEDA saying that – it is ANN (my acronym for Author Not Named) – as usual the PH journalist is reporting in exaggeration with an intent to shock:

NEDA urges… intensified aggie R&D… food security.

The news is implying that it is NEDA alone that sees the urgency of the matter. This is an example of PH journalism –

Story going for the slant of surprise.

Sorry, but it is wrong. Even if you intensify aggie R&D, you cannot achieve food security – you can only achieve food sufficiency, which is an entirely different thing.

PH journalism must learn 2 things:

One: Do not sacrifice accuracy for shock.
Two: Know the correct meaning of the term you use.

Food sufficiencyis physical; food security is political (policy). Under Secretary of Agriculture William Dar, the Philippines is going after food security, while aggie R&D is going after food sufficiency.

For both problems of lack of food security and of food insufficiency, I science writer blame them on budget constraints.

Being an alumnus of the UP College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, and being off-and-on science writer in the last 45 years, and incessant blogger in the last 13 years, I know personally that, for instance, the College of Agriculture & Food Science, CAFS, of UPLB had been conducting as much R&D in postharvest handling of fruits and vegetables since 1977, as its budget allowed. For CAFS, I have just translated from English to Ilocano a brochure on hot water treatment of tomatoes to preserve freshness while awaiting processing or sale. That is to say, it is the lack of funding that is the problem, not the lack of science or planning for R&D.

So, when the news came out that a farmer somewhere in the mountains of Luzon dumped so many tons of tomatoes along the road, it showed that the science of postharvest storage of “extra” tomatoes has not reached the countryside. It’s the lack of budget, not the lack of science.

That is because UP Los Baños has not been diligent in transforming technical literature into popular language reading materials. It’s the budget. We recover as one, but one of us needs higher budget!

Why cannot the Philippines take care of its sciences so that the new or improved sets of knowledge, technologies and systems can be translated from technical jargon into the language that the people in the countryside can apply?

Ask UP Los Baños: PH aggie science awaits higher PH budget!@517

The 4th Of July, My Independence Day!

Yes sir! Yes mam! My favorite PH Independence Day is today, the 4^th of July – it was 04 July 1946 when the United States of America gave back my country the Philippines the right to govern itself that it had won back from the Japanese invaders of these islands.

No, not the 12^th of June. Here’s why. From the “Philippine Declaration of Independence[1]” (Wikisource):

And, lastly, it was resolved unanimously that this Nation… must use the same flag… and the colors of Blue, Red, and White, commemorating the flag of the United States of North America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection which it lent us and continues lending us. (image of 2 flags from Catholic Global Mission[2])

Even Emilio Aguinaldo knew the value of the US of A! “... this Great Nation for its disinterested protection which it lent us and continues lending us.”

We declared our Independence from Mother Spain and at the same time in the same document declared our Dependence on the United States of America! Goodbye Independence Day 12 June 1898!

Anyway, I have loved the English language, American English, ever since I borrowed my first copy of the Reader’s Digest from the library of our high school, Rizal Junior College, RJC, in my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan. I ransacked the RJC library. I was in love with the Digest, TIME and Newsweek, books on British and American literature, westerns, and poems. Among other things, I memorized the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln, Preamble of the US Constitution, The Highwayman by British poet Alfred Noyes, Psalm Of Life by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and so on and so forth.

A loner, I just loved the worlds opened to me by reading the best works in the English language.

In 1965, I graduated from the UP College of Agriculture with a BS Agriculture degree major in Ag Education. That continued my love for the English language because teaching in the Philippines was all in English more than 50 years ago.

In 1975, I began to work as the Editor In Chief of the Forest Research Institute, FORI, and I fathered all 3 FORI publications: monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical forestry journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat. Of course, they were all in English.

Today, I have the unchallenged 5-year claim of being the “World's creative genius online, most prolific writer of non-fiction. Frank A Hilario[3],” the tagline in my blog Creative Thinkering.

Today, by blogging, I continue to actively support The New PH Agriculture in the mind of Secretary of Agriculture William Dar, with his “The New Thinking For Agriculture” as accompanied by the “8 paradigms” of (1) Modernization. (2) Industrialization. (3) Promotion of exports. (4) Consolidation of small- and medium-sized farms (5) Infrastructure development. (6) Higher budget & investment. (7) Legislative support. (8) Roadmap development.

So, tell me, how can I not love the 4^th of July as Philippine Independence Day when it gave me the language I adore?!@517

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[1]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Philippine_Declaration_of_Independence
[2]https://xaverianmissionaries.org/missionblog/july-4th-is-philippine-american-friendship-day/
[3]http://creativethinkering.blogspot.com