2 Secrets To Organic Rice Farming To Live Happily Ever After

I follow Indai Le Cortes Facebook sharing, and I find Reynaldo Andres' happy report: "Researchers Develop Two Ways To Convert Inorganic Farms Into Organic" (May 2017, Agriculture Monthly, agriculture.com.ph) that involve my fellow Ilocanos – except that it does not quite make me happy because Mr Andres does not, or cannot, name any farmer who converted to organic as a result, and the rice farmers are still left with low yields – despite the fact that the study at the Mariano Marcos State University, MMSU, lasted 5 years. Are the farmers really hard to teach?

It may be the other way around: The teachers are hard to teach! All that the MMSU researchers (never mind the names) can promise the farmers are the following eventual benefits of organic rice farming: (a) improvement of soil fertility, (b) increase in population of beneficial insects, and (c) decrease in population of harmful pests. How about high yields? The MMSU researchers can only promise that the would-be organic farm "will eventually solve the farmers’ problems with low productivity." Sorry, that promise is not good enough; the farmer wants high yields now!

I know why schemes for gradual or abrupt conversions into organic farms are not profitable in the first years – inadequate knowledge of organic farming. Even experts equate organic farming only with the application of organic fertilizers! That's only organic fertilizing, not organic farming. And they still use the conventional method of cultivating the soil, plowing and harrowing, which has the following adverse effects: (1) destroys the soil structure, (2) encourages growth of new weeds (old seeds come up from underneath the soil), (3) decreases soil moisture (clods dry up), and (4) you lose good organic matter to fertilize your soil (you destroy the weeds).

Even today, already there is a way to increase the yield of organic rice immediately, at once; it's called the organic System of Rice Intensification, SRI – ask the farmers of Zarraga Integrated Diversified Organic Farmers Association, ZIDOFA, chaired by Joby Arandela, of Zarraga, Iloilo. The ZIDOFA farmers are now enriching themselves following organic SRI!

And there is a way to build soil fertility right away, even before the first rice seedling is planted: trash farming – you turn the weeds into organic mulch right in the field by using your rotavator (Kuliglig). I have my brother-in-law Inso Casasus, whom I taught, to share his experience of it in the last 40 years. If anyone has a farm in Metro Manila and is willing to share it for a demo, 1 ha for conventional and 1 ha for organic, I will be there with Inso. No consultation fees, but your expenses, not mine. Email me, frankahilario@gmail.com .