A proposed solution to save the Ifugao Rice Terraces

( Part 1 )

There are dozens of rice terraces in the Cordillera Autonomous Region (CAR) of Abra, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga-Apayao and the Mt. Province. However, UNESCO has chosen the five clusters of Mayoyao, Hungduan, Kiangan, Batad and Banga-an, all concentrated in Ifugao, as one of World Heritage Sites and classified these under the endangered list. That means it must receive immediate attention.

People think that the Ifugao Rice Terraces problem can be resolved simply by improving the cultivation of rice. That is not so since the average Igorot family today owns only 2000 sq.m. of rice paddies. Not even a hectare, unless the whole clan put the original inheritance together. Thus, the young Igorot heirs in the past three decades leave home to work in Baguio, Isabela or Quirino provinces. To bring them back, they have to see that they can produce more than rice.

After a visit last February to Hungduan and Mayoyao clusters with our O.B. Montessori Thai farm consultant, M.L. Professor Charuphant "Noi" Thongtham, he saw that the solution lies in extending the harvest to vegetable patches, flower and ornamental gardens, as well as exotic temperate fruit trees. Add to this a communal forest with fast growing miracle trees and upland bamboos, the Igorot wood carvers would prosper without touching the existing forests that nourish the watershed.

Professor Noi’s vision of a self-sufficiency farm

In 1968, Professor Charuphant Thongtham of the Agricultural University of Kasetsart finished his B.S. in Agriculture at the Central Luzon Agricultural College (CLAC) in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija. For four years in Nueva Ecija, he felt he learned very much. Today, as our farm consultant at the 11-hectare Sulsuguin, Alfonso farm on the border of Tagaytay, he wondered why the Thais who are not as advanced, can do much more than Filipinos.

Married to a Filipina (Normita is one of Bangkok Post’s editors), Professor Thongtham remembered years ago he drew a plan for his brother-in-law who owns a rice field and onion farm. His proposal was to fence the land with Bangkok bamboos since these sell well in the market. The onion farm can be crop-rotated with other vegetables. A four-meter by eight-meter pond can be dug which can be filled up with catfish from Bangkok. He reminds his brother-in-law not to think of bangus. Thais prefer hito and dalag since they are not bony.

It broke the Professor’s heart when his brother-in-law rejected the idea for "he cannot reprogram his farming anymore". Professor Noi did not foresee that his heart would heal again 30 years later when he would set up the Operation Brotherhood Montessori school farm.

Farm school operations in Europe and Australia

In 1986, there were 70 state universities and colleges heavily funded by the government to promote agricultural training in the provinces. Now, there are 111 state universities and colleges, and most of them do not anymore have agriculture courses, having shifted to computer education.

Since Dr. Maria Montessori’s vision of the high school is a commercially earning farm, the erdkinder (children of the land) to satisfy the teenagers’ quest for economic independence, I began to visit the agricultural university of Silliman, Los Banos, Silang and Mariano Marcos where I also recruited agriculture faculty members.

I based my selection on the experiences I had in European school farms as early as the mid-sixties when I was a scholar in Perugia, Italy. Later, when I was in the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris, I would visit farm high schools in France, such as the St. Germaine en Laye. I learned that farmers are highly subsidized by the state here. However, farmers cannot get any loan unless they take a ten-month course in this school.

I also visited Denmark where small farms managed by a couple are quite profitable because of their effective cooperatives. Their agricultural college requires freshman students to learn agriculture theory. In their second and third year, the students have to work in licensed farms. Then, they go back to the college in their senior year to take up a Farm management course.

In Australia, I saw a lot of farm high schools. This dates back to their history when convicts from England were sent to this new continent. The British government focused on the clearing of the wilderness and the establishment of agriculture high schools which still exist today. Saul’s High School Farm in Sydney, Adelaide Agro-Tech School, and the King’s School at Melbourne had faculty members who wrote their lessons in book form instead of lesson plans. This is possible because the teachers are practitioners who knew the actual practice of vegetable, ornamental and fruit tree production besides raising farm animals.

Some of the schools were into viniculture, an important industry in Australia, when Italians, Germans, and French immigrated after World War I, they cultivated the vineyards.

The frustration of setting up a farm high school

In the ’80s I opened the Operation Brotherhood Montessori Professional High School and was quite frustrated since no one could help me set up the farm. Although the Agriculture teachers I recruited had average to high average intelligence, they did not know much about actual farming, least alone managing a farm. They are familiar only with cash crop products such as rice, onion and tomatoes. They barely acquired a love for plants.

Getting the assistance of European or Australian agriculture experts who were used to growing plants in cold climate would not only be too expensive but rather impractical. Then by chance, I met M.L. Professor Charuphant Thongtham. An expert horticulturist, he is a much loved professor of the University of Kasetsart in Bangkok, Thailand. His enthusiasm to help set up the OB Montessori farm led to the signing of the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).

In 1998, a MOA was signed between the Kasetsart University president, Thira Sutabutra and myself as OB Montessori’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Professor Noi has helped our school use Thai farming technology through exchange of instructors, instructional materials, publications and purchase of advanced farming equipment and tools.

How the Thai King’s Royal Projects helped farmers in crisis

As early as 1997, Professor Noi and I exchanged visits. From the beginning, he identified himself as the officer-in-charge of the horticulture areas of the Royal Project in Chiang Mai. Recently, he was appointed a director of Her Highness Queen Sirikit Agricultural Project.

Bordering Burma, the eight hill tribes of Thailand used to plant opium. Working closely with the Thai king for eight years, Professor Noi helped replace this habit by teaching them to plant ornamentals which are dried, bleached and scented for dry flower arrangements. The Kasetsart plant factory, which employs dozens of village girls, regularly exports to Europe and Japan 30 million baht worth of these flower arrangement. (One baht is slightly higher than a peso.)

Since His Royal Highness King Bhumibol Adulyadej has committed himself to travel annually to different farms in the country, he considered the Kasetsart University plant research very valuable for the small farmers. Experiments take place in the 320-hectare suburban Khamphangsaen Campus, which yields wonderful harvest of bananas, mangoes, guapple, durian, longan, atis and papaya.

Thus, during the first major economic crisis which setback Thailand, the king was able to persuade the Thais to go back to the countryside and use the "Self-Sufficiency Farm System" where they could have enough food and enough products to sell. He publicized this "New Theory" by assigning a Philippine-trained agronomist Manoon Pumklom, Professor Noi’s classmate in CLAC, Nueva Ecija, to direct the Lopburi Crop Experiment Station. In this crisis, the food prices in Thailand retained their original price. The Thai king’s model farm ranging from 6000 sq.m. to one hectare multiplied the original harvest of 180 kilos of rice to several tons only after a year. It includes vegetable and sampaguita gardens, a bamboo grove with dendrocalamus asper, fruit trees and a fishpond which is also used during droughts.

Professor Noi’s fern and bromeliad research center in Kasetsart extends to another experimental station in Chiang Mai. He has published a total of four colored glossy picture books on ferns, bromeliads and general plant science. Unfortunately, they are all in Thai.

Raising the goal of a school into a business farm

Advised by Professor Noi, I sent a total of five agriculture teachers and an engineer to Thailand. Their three trips covered training and visits to ornamental and vegetable farms and markets, fruit plantation specially pineapple, forest research center, fish ponds and fertilizer production.

Recently, another engineer has gone to Bangkok to learn the latest water sprinkler system to protect 1000 young forest windbreaker eucalyptus trees and 900 fruit trees grafted with scions of Thai seedless lanzones, seedless atis, Bangkok pomelo, longan and durian.

Between 1998 and 2003, Professor Noi helped set up two OB Montessori farms: a half-hectare school farm in the BF Las Pinas branch and the 11-hectare Tagaytay-Alfonso farm (Akela and Lord Baden Powell Camps). Let me describe the most important features in the Las Pinas farm:

The Seed Germination Shed (162.5 sq.m.) is where newly sown seeds and transplanted seedlings are grown. Six cubicles can accommodate 500 seedling trays of vegetable, flowering and herbal plants. Six lateral overhead mini-sprinkler system patterned after Thailand’s design are used to water the young plants early in the morning and late in the afternoon.

The Nursery Shed (90 sq. m.) is where the transplanted seedlings from the Seed Germination Shed are further grown. This shed can accommodate between 1500 to 2000 young plants up to one meter high. Three lateral overhead mini-sprinklers are installed to water the plants and a thermometer is used to monitor the daily temperature. This is an additional budget of P50,000.

Two major requirements of an effective farm is the compost production unit and water reservoir. The Compost Production Unit (90 sq.m.) is where the different compost media are placed. It consists of ten cubicles, each cubicle holding a different compost medium: river sand, garden soil, burnt rice hull, saw dust, cocopeat, coconut husk, animal manure, dried leaves, rice hull and lime. A P40,000 Thai coco chopper helps much. Each class is required to make one compost bed measuring one meter by five meters every school quarter. To enhance faster decomposition (just one month), compost digester — a microorganism from Thailand is added to the compost. Students sell the compost product produced weighing three kilos at P20 per bag. Sundrying and Mixing Areas, eight water tanks (800 gallons each) are provided.

The Vegetable Gardening Experimental Field is divided into three parts. The boundary lines are planted with windbreaker plants from Thailand such as three Bangkok tamarind trees, 20 miracle trees, 12 mahogany trees and 13 sesbania trees.

Area I (500 sq.m.) is maintained by Grade IV and V students and is planted with Chinese cabbage, Thailand sweet basil, oregano, lemon grass and alpinia galanga, Thai patchoy and bitter gourd.

Area II (1,200 sq.m.) is maintained by the High School students and is planted with sweet corn, watermelon and squash at its vegetative stage.

Area III (700 sq.m.) is planted with tomato, Chinese kale, spring onion and different fruit trees from Thailand such as star fruit, longan and calamansi.

All of the above were guided by monthly charts and instructions written by Professor Noi like a monthly "lesson plan."

This alone would not meet the business goal of the larger farm in Sulsuguin, Alfonso. Just to clear the first parcel of 6-hectares we had to buy a farm tractor discounted for school use. With other farm equipment it totaled P950,000. Farm facilities and infrastructure amount to P2,100,000. Yearly operating expenses for crop production including vegetable and fruit tree grafting, as well as seeds and fertilizers is P850,000. One full-time agriculture manager, an administrator, an engineer, three full-time farm helpers, including 10 village casual helpers total P1,500,00 yearly.

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