Survival economics

Alden Baluro’s father, a hardened farmer of 30 years, did not say anything when the idea of zero tillage was brought up to him by two of our staff. But it was evident that he was unconvinced. Instead, like a dutiful father, Alfredo gave a small portion of his clearing in Sityo Quintolimbo, Brgy. Lake Danao to Alden, 20, as if he wanted to tell his son, “Go ahead with your foolish ideas. Let’s see what you make of it.”

At once, Alden cleared the grasses that had grown on the site, letting the cut grasses rot on the ground for a few days. Then he rented a carabao to make shallow farrows where he would plant his beans. After mixing compost made of rotten grasses and chicken dung at the planting sites, he planted the seeds. A week later, he staked four cogon grass stalks around each plant for it to climb. All in all, he spent only 45 pesos, a far cry from the P600 he would have spent had he followed the usual practices.

Last week, he started to harvest 27 kilos from his 10 x 10 square meter patch of land, selling it at P30 a kilo at the market. A few days after, he harvested again more than 10 kilos at the same price. This week will be his third harvest.

Now Alden’s father meets him with a huge grin. After all, that was the reason why he got drunk the other Sunday to celebrate the harvest. Never in his life had he spent so little and harvested so much on a small patch of land. And Alden has planted other crops too together with his beans and expects to earn more income from his little farming enterprise.

The story of Alden and his father is a classic case of a conflict between an old, tradition-rooted farming system and the bold, innovative technology that is firmly rooted in environmental sciences. The older Baluro represents a class of farmers accustomed to clearing the forests to make way for small farming patches, then using the plow and the carabao to pulverize the soil in order to prepare it for planting, supplementing whatever soil deficiencies with chemical fertilizers and exterminating all insects, harmful or otherwise, with chemical pesticides, and then after two cropping seasons when the soil has been overused and its natural elements exhausted, abandoning the land and looking for another patch of a nearby forest to clear and burn.

He is an expert in the use of these chemicals and knows how much to apply for any kind of plant because he has undergone trainings under a government agency which provides these trainings, sometimes under the sponsorship of firms selling these things. He has developed an expertise in soil science and can see signs when the land is exhausted and when it is time to move on to find other patches to clear.

He is also like a weather man who knows the correct season to plant what crops, and that it is best to avoid planting tomatoes during the rainy months starting September because farming could end disastrously.

But like other farmers around, he refuses to learn lessons from his own bad experiences in farming. For instance, he can’t seem to understand why his once-fertile land has become arid with the constant use of chemical fertilizers, or why, despite massive applications of pesticides, the pests return in bigger numbers and with greater immunity to decis and malathion. Although he sees his soil is washed down the h ill after a heavy rain, he continues to pulverize his field with the plow, sometimes with the furrows going down with the slope of the hill.

He cannot understand why a successful crop could still end up a disaster at the market when the prices fall. He persists on his bad farming habits, waiting for the day when he has a successful crop and the prices are high. That day never comes, of course, because when he is successful in production, others will most likely be also, and they will bring to the market hundreds of kilos of each commodity – which the market would naturally refuse to absorb at the same old price levels.

Blood pressure monitor

Farm economics does not seem to be one of the topics offered by government agencies because all that it is interested in is for the farmer to produce and produce for the market. The farmer has to find that out for himself because government has not established an information system to benefit the small farmers. It does not have data how much tomatoes, cabbages, pechay, onions, sweet pepper, squash, eggplants or ampalayas people could consume, say in a week or in a month. In other words, its production slogans, encouragements and inducements for farmers to produce hang in empty air.

What farmers need at the moment is the ability to feed their own families using their present resources and to have a little surplus which they can sell on a much smaller scale. They need to move away from a market-driven production system that tells them to plant single crops, using loads of fertilize and drums of toxic pesticides. They need to learn survival economics because this is what will keep them alive in these times of crisis.#