Ship Engineer Teoducio Melliza had a satisfying career as a marine engineer on a ship plying the European route. He was earning an above average salary in Euro and as a native of Igbaras, Iloilo, he spent his furloughs with his family and on his spare time, enjoyed developing a small farm in the outskirts of the town. Then in 2002 disaster struck. While his ship was loading cargo in a port in France, benzene leaked from another ship and hit him on the arms.
He didn’t feel the effects asap and went about his work and routine while the ship was enroute to Greece, one of them is to drink plenty of tea popularly called Pito-pito, made of seven herbs known to have therapeutic effects. Somehow getting dizzy, he proceeded to the kitchen and as the cook told him later, he drank at least three liters of water. He slept but woke up later feeling dizzy and drank about a liter of Pito-pito again before passing out. He was airlifted to the nearest hospital and went into coma for more than one day. When he woke up, he was surprised to be asked by the doctor why he was still alive! The tests indicated that the poison in his blood was more than eight times (8x) the lethal dose. The European doctor must have been surprised that Ducio still alive!
He recovered and was given a compensation that enabled him to retire and maybe recover fully. However his doctors told him that normally the contamination will lead to a more serious disease like cancer. Undeterred, he shifted to a more natural lifestyle, opting for more vegetables and took to drinking more tea made out of herbs and plants noted to have detoxifying effect. He had attributed his survival from the benzene attack to his regular drinking of Pito-pito tea which he had always brought with him in his assignments.
In the mid 1990s he had acquired a 1.4 hectares bare land. As in most abandoned hilly farms in his hometown, Igbaras, Iloilo the land was laid bare by incessant corn and dry land rice. From the start, he had a dream of transforming the farm and having limited ideas, he just planted fruit trees while continuing rice in the terraced paddies. Since the soil had been much abused by non-stop rice planting, he never harvested a profitable crop and used the harvest for food.
So when he got home after his hospital stint, he started to seriously develop the farm. He went around to fish for ideas and read a lot. He also visited schools like UPLB to gain knowledge on how farm projects are started and made profitable. Meanwhile, he planted as many trees as he can in the upper portions of the area and never burned anything. All the leaves, twigs and branches were cut to manageable sizes and left to rot on the ground. Some of the branches however were used as firewood but the ashes were returned to the soil, either in the immediate area or hauled to the rice field.
As he plodded on he gained technology like the natural farming system developed by Dr. Teruo Higa and advocated by the technicians of the agriculture office both at the municipal and provincial levels. He also decided to invest in good goat breeds like the Nubian and Saanen. Copying the goat management technology found in most modern farms, he also built an elevated house where he can house the goats and bring in cut forage. He also adopted mixed feeding using cut forage with compounded feeds like lactating mash and salt supplementation.
General Practices Adopted:
Ducio or Siok as he is called by friends and family has developed simple procedures for his farm. He does not burn the hay, leaves, twigs and other organic waste unless necessary like cooking. He simple piles the organic matter in strategic areas so that they will decompose in time. Twigs and branches left on the ground become food for the termites which in turn become feed for the chickens and ducks on free range. The decayed organic matter are regularly harvested and distributed evenly on the rice paddies before the land preparation to serve as organic matter and fertilizer for the rice plants.
Trees were established on the highest portion of the property just below the highway and has become a forest in just five or six years. The trees have helped reestablish the shallow water table that now provides moisture even during the driest part of the year.
Leaves and twigs gathered are poured over with the wet manure from the goat houses and sprayed with the probiotics to hasten decomposition. Instead of the usual two to three months of waiting for the leaves to fully decompose, Ducio can already use the organic fertilizer in about 45 days.
The farm does not use chemical poisons to control insect pests. The mixed planting of various species including the forage grasses has established an ecosystem that is somehow stable and which makes the plants less prone to insect pest and disease attacks. Instead of treating pests as such, they can be turned into allies. The natural system in the farm has encouraged insect predators to reestablish. Dragonflies now populate in droves and are found almost anywhere. So are the spiders which now found everywhere in the farm especially on napier and wild red cane stands, natural deterrents against the upsurge of plant hoppers, the deadly host of the dreaded Tungro disease.
Snails like the African Giant Snail and the Golden Apple Snail (kuhol) are a rich source of protein for the farm animals. African Giant Snails love to hide among the moist decaying leaves, especially bananas and napier grasses which are rich in carbohydrates. Ducio and the farm help simply turn the leaves over and gather the snails and chop or crush them for feeding directly to the ducks, geese and chickens.
The chickens are on free range from hatching to maturity. They are left to forage among the trees and grasses and after the rice harvest, in the paddies so they can clean up the left over grains. Since the farm has become forested and cool, Ducio said that even snakes have repopulated and have attributed the loss of some chicks to having been eaten by snakes. The good thing about snakes however is that they have kept down the rat population and thus the damage to the rice crop is almost nil.
Goat Raising:
Ducio has invested in two purebred bucks, one Saanen and the other Nubian. He used this to cross with the native does he had acquired years before. The resulting F1 are prolific milkers and he found a good way to make money on the goats. He sells pregnant native does for P1,500.00 and there are many buyers because they can recover their investment fast and some said that their does gave birth to twins in just 3 months.
He raises them both on free range and housed, bringing in cut forage and feeding concentrates regularly. The kids are healthy due to balanced nutrition and their access to salt anytime. He had planted some areas and the borders with all kinds of forage grass and legumes like ipil-ipil, centrosema, rhinzonii, flemingia, napier, red wild cane and other succulent grasses and plants. These are cut regularly and fertilized with the decomposed leaves and manures.
Natural Rice Farming.
Another innovation that Ducio developed is his culture of his rice crop the natural way. He prepares the land by adding generous amounts of organic matter coming from the goat house and the compost piles spread around the farm. Then the land is tilled well so that the organic matter is plowed under. Rice is planted in straight rows and water is controlled to keep the damage of kuhol to a minimum. Once the rice plants are more than a month old, he introduces water up to 6 inches deep to encourage the kuhol to populate and feed on the succulent weeds growing between the hills of the rice plant.
Passing farmers once commented negatively when they saw the snail eggs lodged midway the rice plants but Ducio simply dismissed their fears by telling them that the snails are harvested regularly to keep damage to a minimum. Harvesting is very easy says Ducio. He simply places bundles of hagonoy, Chromolaena odorata (L.), on the deep portions of the field or near the dike where most of the water passes through before spreading throughout the paddies. He then visits just before sunrise to harvest the snails which by then has congregated on the pile of hagonoy to feed on its sweet smelling leaves and stems. In an average day, he can get 20-25 kilograms until the population had been reduced greatly.
The regular addition of decomposed manure, leaves and twigs from the compost piles he had made among the trees has made the soil in the rice paddies more absorbent. Even during the driest part of the year when all the other farmers had stopped planting rice, Ducio can still harvest betweeen 60 to 80 cavans in the 6,000 sq. meters of planted area. Since 2005, he had been able to plant 5 croppings every two years, or 2.5 croppings per year, not bad for a rainfed rice farm.
Learning Area for Other Farmers:
Ducio’s farm has become a learning area for other farmers not only in his municipality but from other places as well. Farm technicians and agricultural officers had recommended to other farmers to visit Ducio’s farm so that they can learn the basics of natural farming. Visitors learn many things from Ducio’s farm, mostly simple technologies on how to make their farms more productive on less inputs. They also learn how to make their own probiotics, herbal pesticides which are more simplified and based on indigenous and common weeds like hagonoy (Chromolaena odorata (L.)) which are pungent and can serve as deterrent and repellent at the same time.
Making the Agribusiness Full Circle:
Ducio realized early that a farmer needs to complete the agricultural cycle if he is to make himself economically independent. Thus, late in 2007, he struck a deal with the local parish to put up a building on a Build Operate and Transfer scheme where he will provide a lease rental for the lot and turnover the said building after 25 years. He built a 5 door store and occupiedtwo of them while leasing the three others. On the two spaces, he is now selling agricultural products and inputs as well as basic materials needed in a boom town like Igbaras.
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