Text and Photos by Henrylito D. Tacio
One of the barangays in Marilog District used to be accessible only by passing through five kilometers of steep mountain trail. In the 1960s, it was predominantly occupied by the Bagobos. The wave of migration by the lowlanders in the early 1980s drove most members of the tribal community farther into the remotest mountains.
Today, the 31 households in the barangay are composed mostly of Cebuano-speaking settlers with a few remaining Bagobo families.
“At first, everything was just fine,” Manang Graciana recalled. “We had enough and almost everything was affordable. We practiced slash-and-burn farming. Land was fertile and the use of fertilizer was unknown to use then.”
Then, in 1990, they noticed that the produce from their farm declined. This was evident in the farm of Mariano Maughay. A jeepney driver for a decade, he decided to become a farmer when a distant relative allowed him to till the 1.5-hectare land on the slopes of a mountain.
With very little knowledge on farming, Maughay cleared one-fourth hectare of the area and planted corn. Initially, the harvest was good. Eventually, though, production significantly plummeted. Even if he applied fertilizer, the same thing happened.
What Maughay doesn’t know — just like most upland farmers — that the problem lies not on the crops or varieties they are planting but on the area where they are planting. The farm is totally devoid of topsoil, the primary resource in agriculture.
“Soil is related to the earth much as the rind is related to an orange,” an American geologist once explained. “It is the link between the rock core of the earth and the living things on its surface. It is the foothold for the plants we grow. Therein lies the main reason for our interest in soil.”
Soil erosion is a serious threat — to the country’s food production. “Soil erosion is an enemy to any nation – far worse than any outside enemy coming into a country and conquering it because it is an enemy you cannot see vividly,” said Harold R. Watson, an American agriculturist who received a Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1985 for peace and international understanding. “It’s a slow creeping enemy that soon possesses the land.”
Watson knows. He was the former director of MBRLC; he is now retired and back in his hometown in Mississippi. He came to the Philippines in the 1960s and during that time, he sounded the alarm of deforestation and soil erosion.
But people laughed at him. They told him, “We’re never going to run out of trees!” That was before several presidents, other Asian governments, the United Nations – and countless farmers – recognized the value of his insights.
Although Watson is now retired and back in his birthplace in Mississippi, he said the Philippines must do something to save the topsoil. “Land is not being remade,” he pointed out. “Soil is made by God and put here for man to use, not for one generation but forever. It takes thousands of years to build one inch of topsoil but only one good strong rain to remove one inch from unprotected soil on the slopes of the mountains.”
Soil scientists claims 58 percent of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares is susceptible to erosion. “For one, the magnitude of soil erosion in cultivated sloping areas has reached an alarming proportion,” deplored Angel C. Alcala, former secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and also a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee.
Twenty-eight years ago, the environment department reported that 22 provinces in the country had already an “alarming” soil rate. At that time, Batangas in Luzon and Cebu in the Visayas had been reported to have lost 80-85% of their topsoil to erosion.
Marinduque had 75-80% soil erosion while Ilocos Sur and La Union had 60-70%. Zamboanga del Sur, Zamboanga del Norte, Lanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, Misamis Oriental, Bukidnon, North Cotabato, South Cotabato, Davao del Sur, Davao Oriental, Davao del Norte, Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, Iloilo, Aklan, Capiz and Antique had more than 50% soil erosion.
Soil erosion is not a new phenomenon. Archaeological sites of civilizations, studies showed, were undermined by soil erosion. The fertile wheat-growing lands that made North Africa the granary of the Roman Empire are now largely desert. The lowlands of Guatemala that once nourished a thriving Mayan culture of five million people were drained of their fertility by soil erosion.
“Without soil, there would be no food apart from what the rivers and the seas can provide,” declared Edouard Saouma, former director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The soil is the world’s most precious natural resource. Yet it is not valued as it should be. Gold, oil, minerals and precious stones command prices which have led us to treat soil as mere dirt.”
Soil, aptly described as “the bridge between the inanimate and the living,” consists of weathered and decomposed bedrock, water, air, organic material formed from plant and animal decay, and thousands of different life forms, mainly microorganisms and insects. All play their part in maintaining the complex ecology of a healthy soil.
In the humid tropics, starting from a sandy base, a soil can be formed in as little as 200 years. But the process normally takes far longer. Under most conditions, soil is formed at a rate of one centimeter every 100 to 400 years, and it takes 3,000 to 12,000 years to build enough soil to form productive land.
“This means that soil is, in effect, a non-renewable resource,” says a FAO publication. “Once destroyed, it is gone forever.”
“No other soil phenomenon is more destructive worldwide than is soil erosion,” wrote Nyle C. Brady in his book, The Nature and Properties of Soils. “It involves losing water and plant nutrients at rates far higher than those occurring through leaching. More tragically, however, it can result in the loss of the entire soil.”
In their book, Soil Erosion: Quiet Crisis in the World Economy, author Brown and Edward C. Wolf said soil erosion threatens food production: “The loss of topsoil affects the ability to grow food in two ways. It reduces the inherent productivity of land, both through the loss of nutrients and degradation of the physical structure. It also increases the costs of food production.”
The two authors continue: “When farmers lose topsoil, they may increase land productivity by substituting energy in the form of fertilizer. Farmers losing topsoil may experience either a loss in land productivity or a rise in costs (of inputs). But if productivity drops too low or costs rise too high, farmers are forced to abandon their land.”
A recent study by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that approximately 30 percent of the world’s arable crop land has been abandoned because of severe soil erosion in the last 40 years.
“When soils are depleted and crops are poorly nourished, people are often undernourished as well,” Brown and Wolf contend. “Failure to respond to the erosion threat will lead not only to the degradation of land, but to the degradation of life itself.”
Fortunately, the MBRLC discovered a sustainable farming system that helps curtail soil erosion. It is known as Sloping Agricultural Land Technology (SALT). “The principle of SALT is the same as that used by the Ifugao tribes,” explains Roy C. Alimoane, the current MBRLC director. “All we are doing is suggesting using nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs instead of rocks.”
The SALT system still requires careful management of the space between the rows of trees and shrubs. A combination of permanent, semi-permanent, and annual crops is recommended so as to rebuild the ecosystem and maximize yields while enabling farmers to organize their work time efficiently.
In the SALT farm, one finds a mix of permanent crops (cacao, coffee, banana and other fruit trees), cereals (upland rice, corn, or sorghum), and vegetables (bush sitao, winged beans, sweet pepper, tomato, eggplant, etc.). Every third strip of available land is normally devoted to permanent crops. A combination of various cereals and vegetables are planted on the remaining two strips of land. Each has its own specific area so that there can be a seasonal rotation.
“Crop rotation helps to preserve the regenerative properties of the soil and avoid the problems of infertility typical of traditional agricultural practices,” Alimoane explains on the importance of regular rotation of crops.
And yes, SALT helps control soil erosion. Its study showed that a farm tilled in the traditional manner erodes at the rate of 1,163.4 metric tons per hectare per year. In a SALT farm, there is still erosion but minimal – 20.2 metric tons per hectare per year.
The rate of soil loss in a SALT farm is 3.4 metric tons per hectare per year, which is within the tolerable range. Most soil scientists place acceptable soil loss limits for tropical countries like the Philippines within the range of 10 to 12 metric tons per hectare per year.
In comparison, the non-SALT farm has a soil loss rate of 194.3 metric tons per hectare per year.
Meanwhile, Watson urged Filipinos to change their way of thinking about the environment. “We face the reality of what man’s against the earth have caused,” he said. “We see land degradation expressing itself in destruction of forests, loss of topsoil, pollution of streams and even the air we breathe. We are facing not a mere problem; we are facing destruction and even death if we continue to destroy the natural resources that support life on the earth.”
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