The Moncada Initiative

CS2. Manila as Climate Change City

2009-10-30T18:44:00.002+08:00

MANILA - Today, on my initiative, Manila will lay claim as the Climate Change City of the World. And I'm only half joking.

26 September 2009; in Marikina, when it rained, it didn't pour - it spilled, too much water too soon, a month's supply of rain in 6 hours. It looked as if Mother Nature had gone berserk, and in fact she had. We made her insane.

Today, how do I explain Climate Change? It's Mother Nature, her temperatures rising.

Temperatures Rising
She can't take it anymore,
children.
We shot the arrows into the air;
Our Mother was stung,
we know not where.
Take that! Carbon dioxide,
one heat-seeking missile.
And that! Nitrous oxide,
two heat-seeking missiles.
And that! Methane,
three heat-seeking missiles.
~!@#$%^&*()_+{}:"<>?
Finally, she got the idea.
She got mad.
So, she made the planet hotter,
the waters on the islands
and in the seas rise faster
into the air.
She loaded the clouds more,
snapped her fingers,
and down went the heavier rains
in lesser time
than the lands could take it.
Take that!
And that!
And that!
She couldn't take it anymore.
We can't take it anymore.

Mother Nature is mad; Homo sapiens is madder, for making her mad.

Extreme sports, extreme videos, extreme crimes, extreme affairs, extreme exploitation and extreme arrogance - we are in The Age of Extremes. But those are nothing.

The assaults on the Twin Towers and Pentagon were nothing.
The war in Iraq is nothing.
The military rule in Burma is nothing.
Hunger in the whole of Africa is nothing.
HIV/AIDS in the whole hedonistic world is nothing.
The assault on gender freedom is nothing.
The attack by the White House on Fox News is nothing.
The runaway population is nothing.

Temperatures rising is everything.

Coolly, I am reading the September 2009 issue of the Aggie Green & Gold, the official quarterly publication of the College of Agriculture, CA, of the University of the Philippines Los Baños based in College, Laguna, some 60 km south of Manila. On page 6, LHF Vergara reports on the 1st CA Symposium-Workshop on Climate Change that was held 06 July 2009. I note: It took the College to first notice temperatures rising, or the College is interested in climate change but the University is not? It must be that the farmers are affected but the professors are not.

In the plenary session, Professor of Statistics and Co-Chair of the University Interdisciplinary Program on Climate Change, IPCC, Felino P Lansigan said that the global temperature had increased by 0.2°C in the last 10 years. He said:

Here in Los Baños alone, a 0.5°C increase was recorded, making low-lying areas vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Temperatures rising, waters rising, clouds dropping rains too much too soon. That's climate change.

In the same occasion, Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences and Management and Chair of the University's IPCC Ma Victoria Espaldon talked about 'a number of finished studies and projects as well as plans on how to catch up with climate change.'

I'm not entertaining any planning; I'm entertaining any doing. We can't plan to catch up with climate change; it's already here, and it surrounds us. We must do something, anything.

During the second session of the Los Baños symposium-workshop, the Agricultural Systems Cluster of the College proposed technology interventions in response to climate change. But the report stopped short of mentioning those interventions, except to say 'information and technology transfer' (I suppose, where the experts tell the non-experts what they don't know and exactly what they have to do), and 'development of models for appropriate production systems' (I suppose, computer modeling of the growing of crops and raising of poultry & livestock species that can tolerate soils and weather that are becoming badder and badder). I want to go beyond suppose.

In the same issue of the Aggie Green & Gold, among other people, Teodoro 'Ted' Mendoza, Professor of Crop Physiology, is reported by LB Lanosia Jr & EC Ros as having been appointed UP Scientist I, the title being actually an award:

A specialist in crop physiology, he has authored 53 technical papers and designed courses which are currently offered at UPLB. He is also a recipient of international awards for (the last) eight consecutive years and other numerous citations.

Remarkable enough, but more than that, Ted Mendoza is to me the true-blue 1st Climate Change Scientist of the University of the Philippines, period. He has written audaciously about it; for instance, I published one of his papers, 'Are Biofuels Really Beneficial for Humanity?' in the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, December 2007 issue, when I was Editor in Chief of that journal. (The answer: It depends.) He estimates that he has written 40 papers published in refereed journals here and abroad related to climate change. He has also been invited to speak in many public forums on such topics.

And he has put his foot where his mouth is. What he did in the middle of this month prompted my new blog, The Moncada Initiative, which is dedicated to Big-Ani (big harvest), his current pet project, where he is Consultant, which is dedicated to climate change agriculture. (For more details on the project, click these links: 'Moncada Initiative. BIG-ANI as climate change farming' and 'Pro-Rich! The poor we have always with us.')

For climate change, Project Big-Ani begins with organic fertilizer. That's what Ted Mendoza has come up with that the farmers can do in the farms.

What about us in the non-farms? Now, I have been searching here and there in the World Wide Web about what you and I and they can do about climate change. I just stopped at the point where some experts are saying we don't have much lead time and that if we had just a little time to mitigate climate change, we need to capture carbon dioxide a thousand times faster than we have shot it into the air already.

For this purpose, soil carbon has been proposed as the way to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rapidly. Soil carbon is 'the fastest way of sequestering carbon,' Tim Flannery said (as quoted by Michael Kiely, 03 July 2009, thefifthestate.com). We only have a short while to solve the problem. 'Unless it is resolved in the next two decades, it will destroy our global civilization.'

I half-believe him; the problem is that he didn't tell us how we could do it; and the rest of the article merely talked about the Carbon Coalition and the selling of carbon credits.

Not so fast, Carbon Coalition! If you're talking about planting native perennial grasslands plus new methods of growing crops plus new soil treatments plus regrowth of native vegetation as your soil carbon plan to sell for carbon credits, you're not so fast.

But if by 'new soil treatments' you mean organic fertilizer which results in an organic matter soil (OMS), I'm listening. But if you're looking for the fastest single solution to climate change, I'm sorry I don't think soil carbon is the one; I rather think OMS is better. In any case, soil carbon is only part of an organic matter soil, and it comes without saying, no big deal.

OMS likes it hot! I mean, if you create organic matter soil in all hot spots, those cultivated as well as the deforested lands and open fields all at once - even without planting native grasses, even without new methods of growing crops, even without reforestation - you have already created a carbon sink that is as massive as you can't imagine.

You can make OMS in 3 weeks or less; ask Ted Mendoza if you don't know how. You can use plant refuse; there's plenty of sawdust, or coconut husk, or coir dust, or rice hulls, or rice straw, or pig manure, or poultry manure, wild grass or any vegetation growing or not. Think of all that garbage that comes out of your home or office. Collect them as organic matter and apply that on all those thirsty and hungry soils and what have you got?

(a) A mulch that stops water evaporating from the land.
(b) A rich, organic fertilizer for growing rich crops.
(c) A carbon sink; that organic matter traps the C that O needs to make CO2.
(d) Cooler surroundings. Instantly. No time to wait.

I'm extremely careful saying ' organic matter soil' and not 'soil organic matter' - the point is that that organic fertilizer should be produced right on top of the soil, not in a compost pit or pile, to make the topsoil an organic layer instantly. When organic matter decays, among other things, the water oozes out; when that organic matter happens to be on top of the soil, that water stays where it is; it neither evaporates to the atmosphere nor percolates to the deeper parts of your compost pit. That water is crucial - it has those plant nutrients released by the decay of that organic matter.

So, it's just a matter of quickly adapting Ted Mendoza's Big-Ani organic fertilizer - or adapting any organic fertilizer for that matter - as mulch on the topsoil of all those deforested lands, grasslands, croplands, open lands, gardens and backyards.

And after that, it's just a matter of quickly populating all those organic matter soils with crops, any number of species of plants.

That is to say, you harvest carbon dioxide from the air by putting it in growing plants (photosynthesis) and keeping it on the soil (organic matter soil) all at the same time. Repeat as necessary. It's called the cycle of life and death; it's called loss and renewal.

So in fact, when you create a quick organic matter soil and plant a quick crop, you have a quick double carbon sink: (1) all those plants growing and (2) all that organic matter on all those soils in all those sites growing all those plants. Simultaneously, with very little sweat, you are sequestering carbon on both dead and living matters - you zero in on death to maximize life.

Thus, crops plus organic matter soils make carbon sink times 2. In short, CS2. By nature, CS2 is the fastest carbon sink on Planet Earth. (CS2 is also the fastest agent for soil erosion control you can find anywhere.) The concept is Manila's claim to fame today.

For CS2, remember not to leave any open or degraded or denuded lands without organic matter and without some greens growing.

Quick crops plus quick organic matter soil is the key.
Quick question: To fight climate change, are we using our gray matter quick enough?

Pro-Rich! The poor we have always with us

2009-10-29T19:31:00.005+08:00

MANILA - Today, I'm pro-rich farmers. Time for us to change; why, even the climate is changing! As for me, I stopped being pro-poor farmers a few minutes ago. I'm tired of poor farmers. I'm tired being pro-poor. Pro-poor is hard work.

At 69, with a big family of 12 and for the last 50 years stagnating at upper poor, you can't blame me. I myself am tired being upper poor. Being upper poor, you feel obligated to teach the poor to work harder.

In the village of Sanchez in Asingan, Pangasinan, my father Lakay Disiong was an upper poor farmer. His two sons who were both BS Agriculture graduates advised him to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and he grudgingly relented. One son (that would be me) graduated from the University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture (UPCA); the older son (Emilio) graduated from Araneta University. Araneta, of course, is nothing compared to UP - according to those who graduated from UP. Well, the UP son and the Araneta son both didn't finish when they should; I needed 5-1/2 years to finish a 4-year course; my brother didn't do any better. I got Extremed in-between; I mean, I was kicked out of UP! So was my brother. Does that explain why we were such poor advisors of farming to our own father? (I discovered my love for writing in history while I was still in high school; a degree in Agriculture was not in my dreams.)

I was a farmer's son but what I did mostly was spray the insecticides and the weedicides. My father did not make me plow the field, and I wasn't interested in doing it myself. I was more interested in reading books. The nearest thing to heavy work I did was harrowing: A carabao pulled a wooden harrow and I rode on the animal.

I remember my particular delight when I was spraying the weed killer 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) - I would spray-soak the weeds until the liquid ran down the plant parts, and watch the leaves die - they would wilt before my very eyes. With 2,4-D, I had dramatic power over the weeds. The pleasure was entirely mine.

I remember those years when I was in high school. I would pasture a carabao or two (yes, we often had two of those) in the open fields about half a kilometer from our house; I would let them loose, and then go looking for frogs. My father knew how to cook a delicious dish out of them; ah, that frog's soup! I would bring out my boy-made pana (spear), which I fashioned out of a thick cloth line, about 1 meter long, with a flattened head shaped into a hook. Yes, I was that mechanical enough. My father would not buy me toys. I was a loner, so I had to entertain myself or make my own toys and tools.

My frog's spear was deadly. Once a hole was in sight, my spear would go poking into its innermost recesses. If I heard a crunch, that meant there was a frog living in a hole; now my spear had gone through its body, and it was dying. That would be repeated with so many holes. Thrust, crunch, sure death. Death? Sure. But all I could think of was the delicious meal that would follow so many sure deaths. Even then, I understood that life was a cycle of death and renewal. The frogs' deaths were my renewal.

My father also had a bubon (fish well), a hole in the ground that would fill with irrigation water; when he drained the ricefield, all the water went out of the paddies and all the fishes into that well, still full of water, where they would be as easy to catch as taking candy from a baby. The fishes were my father's game; the frogs were mine. Nature grew the fishes and the frogs that would make delicious, healthy meals. Mother Nature knew best.

As a young boy with a very active imagination, I was interested in girls but not in figures, so I remember my crushes but don't remember how much money my father made from his planting rice. I remember we had one of the biggest granaries in the village in our backyard a distance away from the back of our house. Lakay Disiong was much more industrious a farmer than the others I saw, and he had two sons as backup for his modern agriculture, but why didn't he become filthy rich or, at least, rich? Not that I would have loved being a rich man's son myself.

I'm reminiscing the 1950s, my teenage years. As I see it now, Lakay Disiong didn't become the rich man he would have wanted because he was not a good businessman. For instance, he had money enough for my cousin to go to Mindoro and buy quite a few head of buffalo and ship and truck back home to Asingan and sell in Urdaneta, then and now the cattle market of Pangasinan. (That is the reason why I almost always had two head to pasture - one was for sale, after a little fattening from being pastured on good and free grass in the ricefields or on the riverbank of the Agno River, which was about 1 kilometer from our village.) My father didn't know about keeping enough records and keeping too much faith. My cousin, bless his soul in Heaven, gave him not accounting but his accounts of what happened to the animals and the money. I didn't know this at that time; what I didn't know didn't hurt me. But it was hurting my father, and I didn't know that either.

So, 50 years or so later, I'm not surprised that the Philippines is still agricultural and not yet industrial. With land flowing with milk (many rivers and streams) and honey (countless delicious tropical fruits), we Filipinos are still poor. (Ted Mendoza adds abundance of sunshine.) At our best, we Filipinos are very intelligent, very industrious, very creative, very persistent, and very meticulous - but we are also still very poor. While we are also very good at carping (or crabbing), I don't think that explains why the Filipinos as a people have not become as rich as the Japanese, or the Singaporeans, or even the Malaysians. Aside from the remonstrance of the Roman Catholic Church ('Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything will be added unto you'), I think it's just that we Filipinos have not learned the arts and sciences of credit and marketing.

For credit, we still prefer the moneylenders, the five-sixers, those who demand six for a loan of five, the interest you pay every single day as long as you have not paid back the principal.

And we are poor entrepreneurs too. The Spaniards stayed 350 years in these islands and didn't teach us entrepreneurship. We only think small, too small. The Americans stayed 50 years and didn't teach us better either.

Marketing, of course, is not only selling; it is also buying. And buying, of course, is not only purchasing - it's making sure you're getting good produce or product. And you cannot get good produce if the farmers don't know good agricultural practices.

Perhaps good farmers make bad marketers, that is why the poor Filipino farmers can't ever be rich.

And chemical agriculture makes bad farmers. The chemicals surely killed all the other frogs I could have hunted with my cloth-line spear; the chemicals were deadlier than the male species that I was. The chemicals also killed the fishes of my father. Before all that, the farmers were poor but they had rich food.

Today, you want rich foods; you want a rich economy - then by all means, you have to be pro-rich; you have to grow rich farmers!

That's why we were there in Moncada, Tarlac Province, on 17-18 October 2009, the staff of the PEACE Foundation, and Professor of Crop Science Teodoro 'Ted' Mendoza of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, and I. We were beginning to implement a project by the short name of BIG-ANI (big harvest), Ted being the proponent and now Consultant to the project, and I the historian. It was Ted who taught the farmers how to make their own organic fertilizer.

Let me not forget to mention that the Department of Agriculture under Secretary Arthur Yap is the one funding the Big-Ani Project. Thanks, DA!

The staffs of Big-Ani were there:
Dennis Abuton, Project Manager
Roly Peña, Agriculturist
Che-Che Mogueis, Community Organizer
Dina Alvarez, Finance Officer
Maria Cristina Bejeno, Bookkeeper
Arceli Eugenio, Farm Technician-Moncada
Cristina Gatche, Farm Technician-Gerona
Ofelia Bancifra, Farm Technician-Tarlac City.

There were 38 farmers who attended the 2-day training-workshop; my shot shows one of the farmers sprinkling a microbe-enriched pitcher of water on the pile of matter; the liquid activator will in 3 weeks turn that pile into compost, rich organic fertilizer. This fertilizer will grow a rich crop; this is the cycle of life and death, and life from death.

The village of Tolega Norte in the town of Moncada was the venue. The DA Regional Office of Region 3 was the first to agree to support Big-Ani; these farmers were going to be trained to establish their own organic, integrated farms and be a model for others.

The farmers came from these Tarlac places: Moncada, Gerona, Paniqui and Tarlac City.

Moncada farmers:
Banaoang East: Adar G Duque and Francisco A Vigilia. Banaoang West: Porferio T Granil and Judy C Facun. Santa Lucia East: Roland B Acosta and Ritchie B Acosta. Santa Lucia West: Rhoda L Arlantico, Jennifer S Esposo, and Arnel Q Arlantico. Tolega Norte: Vicente B Lacbayan, Rowel D Eugenio, Roy Bragado, Mercedes B Cuchapin, and Josefina L Marcos.

Gerona farmers:
(Old) Carbonel: Francisco G Joaquin, Wilson D Dela Cruz, Rosemarie F Dela Cruz, and Emelita T Punzalan. Bularit: Homer C Bucad, Gerry A Villamayor, Noly M Corpuz, and Mercy J Corpuz. Mabini: Jennifer M Aquino and Lisa S Gamboa.

Paniqui farmers:
San Isidro: Ofelia I Bancifra, Efren B Gabriel, and Ricardo E David. Apulid: Perlita N Gabriel. Poblacion Norte: Diego Delos Santos. Salumague: Rufino M De Vera.

Tarlac City farmers:
Mabilog: Noel A Mallari, Edwin Cabilangan, Neftaly Mallari, Dominador Galano, Noly A Mallari, Ernesto Ambrocio, Jesus Maristela, and Erick Naguiat.

(For a report of what happened during the training workshop, click the link to read my 'Moncada Initiative. BIG-ANI as climate change farming.')

All these 38 farmers were in the same boat that my father Lakay Disiong was in 50 years ago: high yield, low income. And why is that? Because of chemical agriculture, farming has been having high total cost and low net returns.

What we brought to Tolega Norte Ted Mendoza calls biodiverse agriculture; he also refers to it as biofarming; I call it climate-change agriculture. No quarrel. As far as I can tell, the concept 'biodiverse' refers to the rich variety of crops and livestock recommended to be grown; 'biofarming' focuses on the use of biological materials such as microbes (fungi and such) to hasten the decomposition of organic matter into organic fertilizer; and 'climate-change' emphasizes the avoidance of chemical agriculture and underscores organic farming as a clean option to chemical agriculture and to help mitigate global warming. In fact, Big-Ani is all that, and more.

Big-Ani was going to teach these farmers organic farming plus cooperativism plus marketing. Goodbye to chemical agriculture; goodbye to helplessness; goodbye to high cost of farming; goodbye to usurious moneylenders; goodbye to non-value-adding of produce; goodbye to unprofitable marketing; goodbye to unfair distribution of the benefits of agriculture. That's the big idea.

We know it's a tall order, but that's exactly why we wanted to do it: we wanted to do the impossible. If doing something good is good, what about doing something better that challenges your very best?

In the Philippines, chemical agriculture as a panacea for rice farming was institutionalized during the unforgettable Martial Law years of President Ferdinand E Marcos. He had 'Masagana 99' (Bountiful 99), a rice production project with a name that signified high yield, Great idea! 99 cavans (4.9 tons) to a hectare compared to the 20 cavans average at that time. Now-Representative Salvador 'Sonny' Escudero was Marcos' Secretary of Agriculture. Of that success, Escudero said (Amy R Remo, 26 April 2008, inquirer.net):

The secret with Masagana 99 was the very liberal credit and extension work. We provided farmers with full credit support. We were in full control of our agricultural technicians, whom we regularly educated.

I'm glad the secret wasn't the genius of Marcos! If they were liberal with credit, so should we. We have to give liberal credit to whom liberal credit is due.

Masagana 99 was chemical agriculture. Can we learn from the enemy? Actually, Masagana 99 had only 1 open-secret element, and this was access: access to technology, access to credit, access to price support for rice, access to low-cost fertilizer. The modern technology for the growing of rice came from Los Baños (IRRI and UP Los Baños); credit, price support and low-cost fertilizer came from the government. This was government for the people, for the farmers. Marcos knew what he was doing, and he was good at it, even in agriculture. He had very good advisers, the likes of Dean Dioscoro L Umali and Emil Q Javier of UPCA. He knew who knew more than he did. He was a brilliant manager; he was a genius.

Masagana 99 was then, Climate Change is now. We must stop using chemicals whose manufacture gives off greenhouse gases that make climate change worse. We need climate-change agriculture now! The intelligent response is not another Masagana 99 but something like Big-Ani, avoiding the chemicals and making use of friendly organic materials all available locally, the spirit of cooperation among Filipinos, and the camaraderie among farming families in the villages.

We are thinking of training farmers to become the successful ecological agriculturists that we have not been, in their God's little acres applying organic fertilizers, planting multiple crops, growing trees, raising fish, caring for poultry and livestock, harvesting and storing their produce properly, adding value to them at the appropriate hour - enriching themselves as they do the soil, the surroundings, their villages, their country.

So, I repeat: I'm pro-rich, not pro-poor. I want the poor farmers to be rich! Healthy rich. Getting what they deserve for their labors, multiplying their wealth without prejudice to anyone. Eating organic food, if it be meat; not breathing in mists of insecticides and weedicides; not poisoning the waters in the fields so that fish can go forth and multiply like they used to in my youth. Among other little dreams, I want even my shy grandsons to be able to hunt frogs in the field with their own ingenuity; and I want my granddaughters to taste pesticide-free fish caught fresh in clear water among the growing rice seedlings in verdant fields.

Is that too much to ask?

Moncada Initiative. BIG-ANI as climate change farming

2009-10-21T23:52:00.009+08:00

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.

(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.