Farmer Paolo plants corn

Farming is probably one of the things I will never do for a living. The amount of energy and hard work you put in is disproportionate to the profit you make, if there is any at all. My school, however, thought that going to a farm and planting a few hectares worth of corn would be a terrific change for us no-good lazy bums. So they packed us in a coaster and sent us off to a corn farm in Lubao, Pampanga, which incidentally is our beloved president’s hometown. This corn farm wasn’t just any ordinary corn farm. The Prado farm is home to both Reimon Gutierrez and the Biodynamic farming methods of Rudolf Steiner, the same fellow who founded the Waldorf schools. Biodynamic farming is intended to heal the earth of the harmful effects of traditional farming and its many chemicals. There is a spiritual side to farming, Steiner argued, and if you missed out on that then you missed out on half the farming process. Therefore, your yields will only be half as healthy, less when you consider that your plants have been deluged with pesticides and the like. I’m not quite sure how this spiritual mumbo-jumbo works, but since organic rice tastes a lot better and fills me up a lot faster than commercially refined white rice, I’m guessing he could be right to a certain extent.

Prado farm has a dormitory, which was used before by Couples for Christ as a retreat house. They have long stopped coming, but the owners of the house still keep the rooms reasonably clean. Upon arrival, we were given a brief overview of the activities we would do, and we hauled our baggage up to our respective rooms. Guys and girls had separate wings, and teachers inhabited key rooms in order to best prevent disturbances. The whole school was divided into four groups. Once we got settled in and shot a few hoops at the basketball court, off my group went to the first activity of the day, supervised by veteran biodynamic farmer Greg Kitma. This activity started out with heating up water using three stones, firewood, paper, matches, and a pot. I’m pretty good at making fires, so I had a decent flame going in no time at all. After the water was heated, we added a substance called BD500 to it. BD500 is cow crap stored in a cow horn and buried in the ground for six months at the coldest time of the year. The pot with the BD500 then needed to be stirred for an hour with our hands, creating vortexes in the pot. Witchcraft, if you ask me. We took shifts of eight minutes each, while continually messing up the crap turned BD500 in the pot of warm water. Sure enough, at the end of the hour, the so-called BD500 had been completely dissolved in the water. It just looked really murky. The next activity was spraying the field we would be planting corn in with the cow crap solution, using this sprayer sort of thing that you wore on your back like a backpack. It was pretty heavy stuff, so we males had to spray the first few rows of earth to lighten the load for the weaker sex. It started getting dark by the time we finished, and we prepared the seeds we’d be planting the next day before gathering a few more buckets of cow crap from a nearby cow field. The other groups finished a few hours after we did. We took showers in ant-infested bathroom stalls, and one of my group members claimed to have been bitten on the nuts. I didn’t bother verifying its authenticity. I had contracted a cough a few days before, so for the next few days I would be coughing up hawkers. For you ignorant people, a hawker is something you hawk up from the nether regions of your nose or throat, the color ranging from bright to dull yellow. Doctors tend to call it phlegm. I call ‘em hawkers. Wake up time was at 5:30 the next day, so I decided to hit the sack at eleven. Most people stayed up ‘til the wee hours of the morning, and two people raided rooms when everyone finally went to sleep. Their victim’s hands and face were covered with toothpaste; all of them had nasty surprises when they woke up. Even the 12-year-old runts were not spared the wrath of Colgate. My room, which I shared with fellow ballers Chris and Khalil, seemed to be untouched. Now that night I turned in my bed the wrong way and gave myself a wedgie. I was barely awake, and only remembered digging that sumbitch out of my posterior in the dead of night. It was just too bad that my roommates were not only awake, but the lights were on and the two jesters had entered the room. Later on they were describing in great detail how I was scratching my butt in the middle of the night. Knowing my sensitive beak, they also placed powder of some unknown origin into my nostrils, causing me to repeatedly sneeze in my sleep. I have no recollection of the sneezing whatsoever.

The following morning, the wake-up call resounded, and after a hastily downed breakfast of suman and hot chocolate, the labor began. We were still groggy from sleep, and we stumbled down the rows of corn bearing our measuring device, a shovel, the corn kernels we were planting, a bucket of compost, and a bucket of water. We planted the kernels a meter apart, and group of three kernels had to be placed in a mound of compost, covered with soil, then dampened. Our group alone planted around two mayonnaise jars of corn kernels that morning. We could have made thousands of pesos if cars ran on sweat. Oh, the drudgery of working from 6 to 10:30, with the sun beating down on us relentlessly. As soon as we finished four rows, I headed straight away to the ant-infested showers. However, the morning was not yet over. People had deliberately not taken a much-needed bath, due to the demonstration Greg Kitma was going to be giving on liquid manure. The manure itself looked like a barrel of curry and melted Reese’s, and stunk worse than anything my dad could come up with. Lunch didn’t seem so tasty after that. Reimon’s mother was a great host, though. She made sure that no one went hungry and personally brought food to those who needed it. After lunch, we headed home, but not without me filling a sink with a fresh load of hawkers. A title bout between spiritually grown corn and commercial corn; the proof is in the pudding as we will be harvesting our corn in February, and then we’ll really see whether Steiner and his transformed cow dung had something going on.