Moncada Initiative. BIG-ANI as climate change farming

MONCADA, TARLAC, Philippines - In the last 2 days, from Saturday, 17 October to Sunday, 18 October 2009, we went through a training-workshop on a new concept of agriculture I would like to call Climate Change Agriculture - emphasis on climate change, whether we like it or not. You're looking at manure.

The original project concept came from Teodoro 'Ted' Mendoza, Chair of the PEACE Foundation and a professor of the University of the Philippines Los Baños; I helped package it; I was there to begin to document the process. Region 3 of the Department of Agriculture, DA, had endorsed the proposal and that is why the PEACE staff was there to implement The Moncada Initiative (my term). The DA was doing something right.

We were in Moncada to conduct the first training-workshop. A total of 38 farmers were waiting for us; we were expecting 30. The PEACE staff had done a good job convincing them to attend for their own good.

I came along to write the history I sensed they were going to make. Some people make history; some people have to write it. (Ah, about making and writing history. I remember when we were in college, at the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture, UPCA, in Los Baños in the early 1960s; we were having our snacks at the Coop on campus; we were bragging about who will write the greatest what, we meaning Nestor Pestelos, Rem Torres, Aniceto Llaneta and I, our very own Gang of Four. 'I'm going to write the greatest Filipino short story,' I said. Nestor said, I'm going to write the greatest Filipino novel,' and instantly I said, 'And I'm going to write about it!' I have always been good at dreaming - and repartee.)

Into the Moncada Initiative, the farmers were going to learn how to turn dung into minerals, manure into nutrients, rice hulls into carbon - and mix them all together, to create mounds of black gold: the Big-Ani fertilizer, I'd like to call it that. And that was only the start of something great. After this, they themselves would have to go searching and collecting organic matter of all sorts in and out of town, and I hope they didn't mind dirtying their hands. I didn't - look at the picture.

We were there for a demo. Not the protest kind but the progress kind. We brought them a new concept contained in a project proposal submitted last January, now approved, with an original concept and title, BIG-ANI, an English-Tagalog name which translates to BIG HARVEST, we hope. In any case, Big-Ani is also an acronym for Biological, Integrated, Good Agriculture with Necessary Institutional Support. Biological because living organisms (plants, fungi and microbes) are made active participants in enriching the soil and protecting the crops and therefore insuring good harvests. Integrated because climate change agriculture does not consist only in growing crops but also in raising animals, producing healthy foods and not abusing the environment. Good Agriculture refers to good practices such as cropping with the multiplier effect (multi-cropping), minimum tillage, feeding poultry & livestock with natural food and not giving them growth hormones, cadmium etc. Necessary Institutional Support refers to advocacy and sponsorship by public and private institutions and individuals. We are all in this together. The Filipino is worth fighting for - but we can't do it alone.

The name Big-Ani also suggests bighani, which is Tagalog for charm, seduction, lure. With Dennis Abuton as Big-Ani Project Manager, we designed Big-Ani to seduce conventional farmers into switching to a whole new universe of agriculture, in which the organic fertilizer is the entry point. We were going to show them that the Big-Ani fertilizer was doable, viable, desirable - and would open windows to more rewarding opportunities in farming.

The first day, Ted Mendoza the Professor spent many hours of the afternoon under the unkind heat of a ceiling-less grade school classroom in the village of Tolega Norte as the Moncada sun bore down on Earth in the west, telling them about global warming, how the Philippines would be submerged if it came to that, how things would become worse and not get better until we did something to mitigate climate change. I was sure this was all Greek to the farmers; even so, I noticed that the farmers weren't sleepy. I was.

Note that we were in Moncada amidst the havoc to crops and livestock, not to mention to people, that the Super Typhoons Ketsana (local name Ondoy) and Parma (Pepeng) wrought the last few weeks in many areas in the Philippines, not the least where we were. Some of the farmer participants were saying that some parts of Tarlac where they came from or had to pass through were still under water from Ketsana and Parma. Indeed, on the way to Tolega Norte, we saw many of the ricefields were still flooded; some farmers were harvesting panicles of rice blackened from exposure to moisture and decay. Some Tolega men and women were threshing rice on the narrow concrete road while cows and goats stood on our way. Only the road was dry. It would take weeks before the fields would drain, that is, if no more rains come.

The flash floods are reminders from Mother Nature that we have been over-cutting our forests of their vegetation, whose roots and decaying leaves help hold the soil in place; and we have been over-cultivating our lowland soils and destroying the vegetation that keeps them in place, to the point that a downpour creates a river of water and soil that is now going, going, gone …..

And why do the Binga, Ambuklao, Magat, Pantabangan and San Roque dams have to release large volumes of water when there's too much flooding downstream already? Because there's too much water in those dams and unless you release the pressure by releasing the water held in check, the dams would burst and cause more damage. The damages from the floods have been awful. For more of the same, some people blame the dams. Damn if you do, damn if you don't.

In the first place, why is there too much water too soon? One reason is the super-heavy clouds pouring, say in 6 hours the amount of rains that used to pour in 30 days, according to one estimate. Climate Change. The other reason is that the watershed that is supposed to absorb all that torrential rain and only slowly release the water to the dams, has been destroyed by over-exploitation by loggers big and small, including hillside farmers and charcoal gatherers, by legal and illegal means. It rains on the just and the unjust. What comes down must go down, from upstream to downstream, and that's how the sins of the loggers like them are visited on the innocent bloggers like me.

The flash floods are our global warning about global warming. In the course of the 2-day training workshop, Ted Mendoza repeatedly told the Big-Ani participants about my personal insight that I gave to him much earlier when he asked my opinion about hard-headed people and the stubborn global warming:

Climate Change is the Problem; Climate Change is also the Solution.

The first time he quoted me that first afternoon, he asked me to explain and I told the Big-Ani participants, who came from many towns in Tarlac Province, more or less in these words:

Before these calamities, people were not paying attention. Now you're paying attention. If you don't solve Climate Change, Climate Change will solve you.

We need to change our agriculture because of global warming / global cooling. We can't ignore our profligate lifestyles and extravagant agriculture any longer. If we don't control Climate Change, Climate Change will control us.

You might say I have been thinking of climate change agriculture many decades before this. I have always been a wide reader. When I was working for the UP College of Agriculture as a Substitute Instructor in Horticulture in 1966, or 43 years ago, I ransacked the College's library, became much interested reading and talking and writing about organic farming. I read eagerly the writings of organic farming pioneer Americans JI Rodale and Edward H Faulkner, and Father of Organic Agriculture British Albert Howard, not to mention the American lady gardener Ruth Stout. I found that organic farmers use Mother Nature, not abuse her.

Ted Mendoza and I worked for the Farming Systems & Soil Resources Institute, FSSRI, of the University of the Philippines Los Baños in 1985, with Pids Rosario as FSSRI Director. I remember Ted as a sugarcane professor and I noted that he was already writing about trash farming in sugarcane; he was the Team Leader for Sugarcane at the FSSRI. When I became Editor in Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, in 2003 (working on someone's backlog issues starting 2001), I published Ted's paper on 'the many benefits of sugarcane trash farming systems' (click here to read the full technical paper at reap-canada.com). He wrote of mulching the trash on the ratoon cane field with cane tops and leaves that would result in lower costs and higher yields and therefore higher incomes. I buy that. Unlike the economists of chemical agriculture who don't buy the economics of organic farming.

In the December 2001 issue of the PJCS, Ted came out with a paper discussing ecological agriculture as applicable in the Philippines. In Moncada, what he presented was essentially what can be found in his 2001 paper: minimum tillage, green manuring, composting, mulching, no burning of crop residues and weeds, trees on the farm, multiple cropping, crop rotation, intercropping, and crop-livestock integration. In the paper, he used the technical term 'ecological agriculture;' I have no quarrel with that. I just want to emphasize that ecological agriculture is only a part of Big-Ani, which includes cooperativism and marketing. We must help the farmers to grow well and to sell well. Don't forget to eat well.

So here we were in Moncada, Tarlac and Ted Mendoza was preaching the virtues of making your own organic fertilizer from locally available raw materials: cow dung plus carbonized rice hull plus chicken manure, sprinkled with a watered-down odd mixture of harvested-from-the-air free microorganisms, as well as fungi, that together breaks down all those plant and animal wastes into organic fertilizer in just 3 weeks. The magic of rapid composting.

Ted Mendoza asked the Big-Ani participants a rhetorical question, actually to drive home the point that organic fertilizer is the important thing, properly made, whether you make it or simply buy it. In effect, he said:

I am going to show you how to make your own organic fertilizer. But if you find it too laborious for you, because it is laborious indeed, you can buy from me. Instead of spending only about 50 pesos to make 1 bag, you will pay me 300 pesos for 1 bag. If you make your own, your labor is your reward. If you simply buy from me, your convenience is my reward. You have a choice. Which do you prefer?

On the basketball court in front of the village hall the next day, Ted showed the farmers his formula of making organic fertilizer. In my own words, here's how to make your own Big-Ani fertilizer, following the gospel taught by Ted Mendoza, avant-garde Professor of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

Step 1: Prepare your organic mother.

Ted showed the participants how to prepare a tray out of cheap wood, spread a layer of cooked rice on it, cover it with newspaper tied down, and expose it to the elements, after making sure to put a plastic sheet over the whole thing to protect it against the rain. 3 days later, you are ready to harvest your microbes; mixing the whole mass with brown sugar and a little water, you get your mother liquid. Ted Mendoza calls that the indigenous micro-organisms, IMO; I prefer to call it the organic mother, OM, referring both to the fertility of the intangible (actually, unseen microbes & their power of decay) and the fertility of the tangible that results from the intangible (your black fertilizer, which becomes your rich soil). The organic mother is the liquid you sprinkle on your organic matter, got it?

That organic matter will become your compost. In the garden variety of composting, the plant and/or animal materials decompose naturally, a slow sort of compost. Big-Ani composting is rapid composting. In 21 days, you have excellent organic fertilizer.

Step 2: Gather your organic materials.

In the Moncada demonstration, the materials locally available were very wet cow dung and very dry carbonized rice hull and chicken manure. The carbonized rice hull, CRH, was gotten free from those who were making or refining salt somewhere - the hull is used to fire the stoves to boil the salt out of the seawater. The controlled burn gives you CRH. Big-Ani Agriculturist Rolly Peña was telling me the carbonized rice hull was plenty and the saltmakers didn't know what to do with their growing pile of CRH, so they were happy to give it away. If you can't have CRH, you can use plain old rice hull, Ted says. For chicken manure, you have to look for poultry houses to gather enough from.

Ted was demonstrating how to use the shovel to properly mix the whole pile: shovel in, bring towards you and turn sideways, slash, slash, slash. I suppose if you know how to mix cement with sand and gravel, you know how to mix your organic pile.

In the photo, you can't see it, but my right hand (holding camera) knows what my left hand does - whitened fingers pointing to the blackened mound of cow dung nearly completely mixed with the carbonized rice hull and chicken manure, already with a sprinkling of OM. Am I wearing a gas mask? No. No smell whatsoever. And why is that? Simple. The OM absorbs all the smell from all that manure. Here, manure doesn't smell like muck - it smells like money.

Step 3: Sprinkle your liquid organic mother.

The OM is your liquid activator for rapid decomposition. In Moncada, they mixed the organic mother 1 part OM to 50 parts water. They sprinkled the mix over the pile by pouring the liquid over the hand, palm up, while moving all the fingers about to distribute the water as a sprinkler would. I thought somebody forgot to bring a sprinkler.

Step 4: Mix it up, sack it in and wait 3 weeks.

Don't forget to mix the whole pile thoroughly, very thoroughly. After that, shovel in the pile into the sack. Stacked or not, expect the sacks to heat up. That's the organic mother working for you. But since the heat will only be near the surface of the sack, where there is air, you will have to remix the whole sack-full once every 3 days so that the material will decompose uniformly. 3 weeks and your Big-Ani compost is ready to be spread all over the field.

Step 5: Plan your next batch.

It might help if you have a group and you help each other produce the mother liquid, gather the materials, mix a big batch, and share. You enjoy economies of scale.

Isn't that easy? No, it's laborious.

While I was just watching everything, listening and taking pictures, I was thinking: 'Why, this is all work and no play!'

Actually, you can't appreciate the labor that goes into the making of the Big-Ani fertilizer if you are just reading this. I wasn't doing anything except watching and I could imagine the time, money and effort you have to spend gathering the materials where you can find them, perhaps 5 towns away. What about next time? And yes, you will need to prepare 50 bags of Big-Ani fertilizer for 1 hectare.

For foliar spraying, they also prepared fish entrails and gills, to mix with brown sugar, to get fish amino acids (FAA). FAA is herbal organic fertilizer. The liquid would be sprayed on the leaves for its nitrogen and trace minerals. They also gathered kangkong (water spinach) and young banana stalks, cut them down into fine pieces, mixed with brown sugar. (They could use a juice maker, couldn't they?) The material would make fermented plant juices (FPJ); the filtered FPJ would be sprayed on the leaves to drive away the insect pests.

In Moncada, in preparing the wood tray, cooking the rice and spreading a layer of it over the open tray, and in locating an open space and leaving the whole thing there, Ted Mendoza showed the farmers that they had to protect it also against any food-smelling dog, cat or rat. They had to go into so much trouble? Well, doing good works isn't easy.

On the way back from Moncada, Ted Mendoza was telling me that his IMO (my OM) is excellent for removing all the awful smell from garbage anywhere, which means you can turn garbage into a product that farms and gardens would welcome. I hope the Mayors are paying attention: Mayor Alfredo Lim of Manila, Mayor Sonny Belmonte of Quezon City, Mayor Maria Lourdes Carlos Fernando of Marikina, Mayor Ramon Ilagan of Cainta and the rest. All you have to do is spray the mother liquid, which costs almost nothing because it really comes from thin air! This is trash-to-cash simplified, refuse becoming reward in 3 weeks, leavings becoming returns in 21 days, costs turning into benefits in 4 Sundays, fresh air returning in no time at all. What else do they want?

With OM, you can't refuse refuse. So now, garbage can become a change agent, if you will allow it. Indeed, garbage becomes a climate changer, if you transform it, because it helps reduce dependence on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, the making of either of which contributes much to global warming because of the carbon emissions resulting from their manufacture.

If we don't resolve Climate Change, Climate Change will resolve us.

Ted Mendoza refers to the whole Big-Ani concept technically as 'biodiverse, integrated, organic agriculture' or 'bio-agriculture' or 'bio-farming,' while I prefer to refer to it non-technically. I call it Climate Change Agriculture because it changes the multiple climates of:
(1) chemical agriculture
(2) killing weeds
(3) health ignorance
(4) environmental abuse
(5) carbon emission
(6) usury
(7) low incomes.

(1) Climate change in chemical agriculture. Farming with chemicals has been the norm since the 1950s, according to Ted Mendoza, and our farmers, as taught by our agriculture graduates mostly from UP Los Baños, have been chemical farmers since then. Rolly was telling me UPLB graduates make the best salesmen of aggie-related chemicals. I am not surprised. Historically, when the Americans, led by Edwin Bingham Copeland, founded and began to run the UP College of Agriculture in March 1909, chemical agriculture was part of the agenda for research. And if research comes, can application be far behind? My brother and I taught our father Lakay Disiong his chemical agriculture in the 1960s, and he was happy with the results: high yields. Decades later, I began to notice that all those frogs we caught in those rainy nights and cooked for a delicious dinner the next sunshiny day, those crabs, those fish were all gone, decimated by the drug abuse of people not unlike the unknowing Hilarios, of all people! Today, with Big-Ani agriculture side-by-side, you can see that chemical agriculture leaves much to be desired.

(2) Climate change in carbon emission. In the December 2001 issue of PJCS (pages 31-44), Ted Mendoza computed that of the 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide loaded into the atmosphere each year, 4 billion tons of that is contributed by agriculture and land clearing alone. If loggers, hillside farmers and charcoal gatherers stopped clearing the forests; if farmers and planters stopped clearing their fields of vegetation, stopped practicing chemical agriculture and started applying the principles of Big-Ani farming, they will be contributing much to the reduction of carbon emission around the world. Not to mention bringing about the side-effect of having more fresh air for us mortals to breathe in.

(3) Climate change in killing weeds. The fastest way to kill weeds is to spray a weedicide; that's chemical agriculture. When you prepare your Big-Ani fertilizer, the weed seeds are killed by the decomposition process - the fungi will eat them and the microbes will bore holes in them and the acids will put an end to any life activity, so that after 3 weeks you have a very black and very rich soil. Ted prescribes 50 bags of the Big-Ani fertilizer to a hectare to completely cover the field. If I were the Big-Ani farmer, I would also do some surface-soil green manuring to completely cover the field with a fresh mulch, that which will decay over time and kill all the weed seeds just dying to germinate once you expose them by plowing the usual way.

(4) Climate change in health ignorance. You can't ignore your health anymore. Big-Ani agriculture is a low-tech approach to a high level of health. If you grow crops using Big-Ani fertilizer, if you control pests and diseases using herbal foliar sprays or the predators of harmful insects and microbes, you can't help but harvest organic rice, organic corn, organic tomato, organic eggplant, organic sweet potato, organic cabbage, organic okra and so on and so forth - farm produce without pesticide residues of any kind. As your crops grow, so does your well-being.

(5) Climate change in environmental abuse. Chemical fertilizers are drugs. Our farmers have been throwing bags upon bags of chemical fertilizers on their fields and farms for years that those soils now have bodies that are victims of drug abuse. They have been drained of life. They have become acidic; they have lost their natural balance of nutrients; they have lost their organic matter and have become easily erodible that with a little rain they will gladly run off with the water. Big-Ani agriculture is the way to go. It is sustainable agriculture.

(6) Climate change in usury. Today, the poor Moncada farmers told me, you need 10 bags of chemical fertilizer to every hectare. That's about 10,000 pesos; the total cost of farming these days is about 20,000 pesos, including cost of pesticides. Oh my God, you have to be rich to be a poor farmer! So, our poor farmers usually borrow from usurers during lean times (between harvests) just to tide their families over; they pick up their bags of fertilizer from the trader in town and, when the time comes, away flies the products of their labors - they have to sell the newly harvested rice to the money lender or pay the local Merchant of Venice a Shylock price - a pound of flesh for a pound of chemical.

(7) Climate change in low incomes. With high yields have come low incomes - because of the high cost of fertilizers, because of the high cost of pesticides, because of the high cost of borrowing money. With the making of the Big-Ani fertilizer comes just a little investment so that you will spend only 50 pesos to make 1 bag; compare 50 pesos with 1000 pesos to buy 1 bag of chemical fertilizer, and 3 chemical fertilizer elements (N, P, K) compared with 15 organic fertilizer elements as plant foods (N, P, K, Fe, Mn, B, Cu, Co, Mo, Ni, Cl, Zn, S, Ca, Se), and you get the Math of the Moncada Initiative. With chemical fertilizers, you are poorer; with organic fertilizers, you are richer.

Are you listening? We are offering Climate Change Agriculture to the world. It may not look much right now, but if millions of farmers do it, they can minimize the damage of global warming to a significant level.

If we don't minimize Climate Change, Climate Change will minimize us.