Senior AgriPreneurship, Yes? Some Ideas Don't Grow Old! Like Organic Farming

Under the new PH Agriculture, with Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie, one of the paradigm shifts is toward youth entrepreneurship in farming. Youth would mean not more than 25 years old, right? Manong Willie is thinking of funding each youth entrepreneur with P500 K to kick off a bright idea or something off the ground, literally.

To be fair – Manong Willie, how about cultivating us senior entrepreneurs in agriculture? I'm 79, and I have a bright idea of my own for a mini-max kind of farming: you know, minimum inputs, maximum outputs.

My bright idea has to do with a different kind of organic farming. No, it is not the organic farming you keep reading about in books, newspapers and even on Facebook. Except the name, this idea actually has been in my mind in the last 50 years or so; yesterday, when I saw the book published by the Asia Rice Foundation, ARF – see half of book cover above – I was reminded of it. It just so happens that the cover shows green and brown – nice metaphor for young and old.

I'll take the P500 K Challenge!

But first, let me talk more about the Asia Rice organic fertilizer book, a compilation of the papers presented in a 2009 Rice Forum organized by the Asia Rice Foundation  and sponsored by PhilRice and SEARCA.

The very title Revisiting The Organic Fertilizer Issue In Rice tells you that the Forum speakers and panelists were not 100% sold to the solo use of organic fertilizers on rice. In the very Foreword to the book by Ronilo A Beronio, Executive Director of PhilRice, the issue is presented in the paradigm of all-or-nothing. Says he in his last paragraph:

We are all for soil that can sustain the needs of our rice crop. We are all for sustainable farming. It's just that we have different formulas. Organic farming sure is a good way to go. But organic fertilizers alone are not enough to produce the food needed to adequately feed our people.

The problem with that paradigm is that to Mr Beronio, organic fertilizing equals organic farming, 100%. That is incorrect 100%.

Take it from me, the pioneer and prehistoric proselytizer for organic agriculture in the Philippines – I wrote about it in the Philippines Free Press when nobody else was talking about it. Indeed, I taught organic farming at the College of Agriculture of Xavier University in Cagayan De Oro City in 1968. How? I put it into my syllabuses in Horticulture – Floriculture, Ornamental Horticulture, Olericulture, and Pomology. (You can ask Nicky Perlas, Right Livelihood awardee, to show you his copies.)

Briefly now, my organic farming is the growing of the soil first– you must start with a rich soil and keep on enriching it even as you grow your crops.

I call my paradigm of organic farming Organic Mattering.

With P500 K, Manong Willie, let this senior AgriPreneur go out and soil his hands and prove he can become as rich as an organic soil in life!@517