Got milk?

A rice farmer can net only about P15,000 per hectare of land per harvest.

On a good year when his crops aren’t destroyed by typhoons, floods or pests, he can have two harvests.

How can a farmer raise a family on P30,000 a year? You can see why some farmers would rather try their luck in crowded cities, taking on odd jobs, or else hire out their teenage children as maids and sometimes even as sex workers.

These days a farmer can augment his income by availing himself of the government’s cattle dispersal program, which could net him an additional P34,000 to P74,000 per animal, over 10 months, from selling milk.

Yes, milk. Carabao milk.

The incoming administration of Benigno Aquino III should provide more support to this laudable effort, initiated about two decades ago by the country’s scientists and agricultural experts, to develop a local dairy industry.

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Libertado Cruz, executive director of the Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) in the Science City of Muñoz in Nueva Ecija, told me that the country is 98 percent dependent on imports for its dairy needs. In 2008, Philippine dairy imports amounted to $712 million.

Among the consequences of this import dependence is that baby formula has become a luxury for millions of families.

The country also imports about half of its beef requirements, including carabeef, the meat in corned beef, mostly from India. Cruz estimates that the annual imports are equivalent to 400,000 heads of cattle.

Cruz, who has a doctorate in reproductive biotechnology from the University of Illinois, has been cross-breeding imported dairy water buffalo with the local carabao, transforming draft animals into producers of top-quality milk and meat.

He and other scientists picked the Indian Murrah breed of water buffalo, a top producer of milk, for propagation in the Philippines.

The government imported the first batch of 220 purebred Murrahs way back in 1994, not from India but from the United States, because the money used was from US agriculture assistance, Cruz explained, “and US salesmen were better.”

The Murrah can grow taller than a typical adult Filipino. It starts mating at two years old. Pregnancy takes 12 months, which means at three years old it can start producing milk - an average of five liters a day, in contrast to the 1.5 liters produced by the native carabao.

From 1995 to 1997, the government brought in 3,400 more Murrahs, in batches of 500, this time from Bulgaria. The ocean journey took 35 days, with up to two kilos of hay used to feed each buffalo.

Cruz, who is involved in cloning experiments in this country, started cross-breeding, and then achieved a global breakthrough by producing the first test-tube buffalo - a process called embryo in-vitro production-vitrification-transfer.

Announcing the groundbreaking research, former President Joseph Estrada memorably said the PCC was on its way to producing the world’s first “tubeless” carabao.

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The “Erap-tion” could be forgiven, considering that it was Erap who, as a senator, had sponsored the bill creating the carabao center. That bill, passed in 1992, was based on sound science. A House version was sponsored by a Nueva Ecija congressman.

The bill was drawn up by scientists and agriculture experts. It was the only piece of legislation Senator Erap principally authored, and it was brought to him for endorsement by his brother-in-law Raul de Guzman, at the time the chancellor of the University of the Philippines in Los Baños.

A PCC team went to India to assemble the Murrah embryo for the test tube experiment. The embryo was flown to the Philippines in a frozen compartment, then implanted in a surrogate mother carabao.

The first “tubeless” calf was born on April 5, 2002, which happened to be the birthday of President Arroyo, so the calf was named “Glory.” Within days of each other, more test-tube calves were born and named after former presidents: Erap, Fidel and Cory. The buffaloes have since produced calves and semen specimens for further propagation.

Last January, the latest test-tube calf was born, this time to a “caracow” owned by a farmer.

Water buffaloes typically produce only one calf per pregnancy, so cattle dispersal still requires importation of live animals.

Last Jan. 18, the latest batch of 2,000 Murrah imports arrived, this time from Brazil.

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Brazilian Ambassador Alcides G.R. Prates, who grew up in Sao Gabriel in Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil’s agricultural region, remembers summer vacations spent in his grandfather’s wheat farm, where milk still warm from cow’s udders were served.

Brazil has 240 million heads of cattle. The typical Brazilian breakfast, Prates told me, consists of café com leite (coffee with milk) and pao e manteiga (bread with butter).

Over the weekend Prates drove nearly four hours from Manila to Muñoz to inspect the buffaloes, hundreds of them still in quarantine at the PCC.

Cruz said the protracted quarantine (now about three months longer), which has meant additional costs for the government, is due to a policy change made not only when the deal with Brazil had already been finalized, but while the buffaloes were already in the middle of their ocean trip to the Philippines.

Instead of the buffaloes meeting a requirement to be free of foot-and-mouth disease with vaccination, they must now be FMD-free without vaccination.

After some debate on whether the buffaloes should just be sent back on the slow boat to Brazil in the middle of their journey, the PCC decided to honor the deal.

In transport to the PCC quarantine center, the shipment suffered another setback: the government packed them together so closely that three died.

A farmer participating in the dispersal program, under which buffaloes are leased for milk and as beasts of burden, must pay up to P160,000 if a Murrah buffalo dies. A native carabao on lease costs P50,000 if it dies.

To reduce the risks, the PCC has developed a sort of insurance cooperative: about 25 farmers pool their money to build up a fund, deposited in a bank, from which they can draw money to repay the PCC in case a buffalo dies.

So far, participants in the dispersal program appear satisfied, according to PCC officials. The center finds buyers for all the milk produced by the buffaloes and cows.

Supply has not been enough to meet demand: Cruz had to turn down a giant fast-food chain because the volume it needed was too large.

The basic need plus commercial demand for milk are there. The incoming Aquino administration will have to give this initiative all the support it needs.