Launched last Tuesday in Barangay Rang-ayan here, the project is a joint undertaking of the Lima, Peru-based Centro Internacional dela Papa (CIP, or International Potato Center), the Department of Agriculture, the Tarlac College of Agriculture (TCA) in Camiling town, the office of Gov. Jose Yap Sr. and Paniqui Mayor Elpidio Ibarra.
Dubbed as the "sweet potato-based feed system" for beef production, the pilot-test intends to find out the viability of using roots and vines of the rootcrop in "improving productivity and profitability of ruminant production (of cattle meat)."
The project also aims to produce good quality feeds by tapping locally available resources, with the use of appropriate technologies.
The project team, headed by TCA animal nutritionist Ma. Theresa Valdez, said the vines and roots of sweet potato will be combined with indigent feed resources in Barangay Rang-ayan "to optimize their nutritional value and enhance the health of the animals."
Ibarra said residents of Barangay Rang-ayan survived the Mt. Pinatubo eruption and the subsequent lahar flows by integrating crops and livestock production in their farming system.
The project team said they hope to come up with a new feed system for beef production "by integrating sweet potato as a major component."
"Traditional practices of feeding fresh sweet potato vines and roots to cattle have been proven to provide additional benefits, not only to the economics of cattle production, but to sweet potato (production) as well," the team said.
The project is being introduced to Barangay Rang-ayan’s farmers through Yap’s Farmers’ Field School (FFS) program.
Yap said the FFS "transforms farmlands into avenues of knowledge, where farmers have a first-hand experience in learning and implementing technological breakthroughs in agricultural researches."
Early this year, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization adopted the FFS program as a model for a corn production project in Europe.
The sweet potato project commenced last June and will culminate in May next year.
Aside from determining the viability and profitability of using sweet potato for cattle feed, the project team said they also intend "to enrich local knowledge on feed utilization through the integration of appropriate scientific information that would enhance the farmers’ household knowledge and skills critical to wise decision-making."
"I extremely anticipate that this project will soon be adopted by all of our livestock producers, especially our farmers, so they would not be overburdened by the high cost of commercial feeds since they would be using an indigent natural resource that is readily available in their farms," Yap said.