After decades of seeing his fortunes rise and fall with his banana farm, Alvin Almendras did the unthinkable.
Without second thought, he had the bananas cut and replaced them with corn. But with a difference: the corn planted belongs to the latest variety of hybrid seeds. He also shifted to organic farming, getting the most of what the Masinag farming technology can offer.
Now there is no looking back. Incidentally, he is only one of two young farmers in Mindanao who have more than doubled the southern Philippines’ average harvests of yellow corn per hectare of land by combining cutting-edge technology in organic farming with the latest variety of hybrid seeds.
Almendras, grandson of the late Senator Alejandro Almendras, said he converted part of his family’s banana plantation into a corn field only this cropping season after making extensive research via the internet.
“I arrived at the conclusion that corn can be the best cash crop in Mindanao due to shortages of corn supply for the feed millers,”Sta Cruz councilor Almendras, a third generation farmer-politician, intimated. His father, Alexis, the town mayor, is a farmer and so was his grandfather, the Senator.
“As far as I know, I’m the first farmer in the Davao region who has boldly shifted from banana to corn farming. He is clearing another six hectares of the family farm to be planted with corn this cropping season.
He also found Oliver Herradura of ViscaFCB who introduced him to the cutting-edge farming practices used in his new corn land.
Almendras had hauled in harvests from less than a hectare out of his 4-hectare corn field last Friday that fetched corn ears exceeding 200 bags.
Based on the initial haul, technicians monitoring the harvest projected average harvests of unshelled corn between 14 and 15 tons per hectare from the Almendras farm. Final figures will be known later this week when hauling of harvested cobs will be completed.
Results from a 5.25 hectare cornland of Gloria Elicano of Sto.Nino, Roxas, South Cotabato was more conclusive with a total gross harvest of 1,055 sacks that was estimated to weigh 12.05 metric tons per hectare.
Harvests from the Elicanos’ farm more than doubled the average yield of yellow corn in Mindanao last year pegged by government statisticians at 4.4 metric tons per hectare and almost triple the national average of 3.3 tons per hectare posted by the National Statistics Authority for the first quarter of this year.
Current prices of dry corn grits in the region last week ranged between P13 and P16 a kilo depending on the grains’ moisture content. At those prices, both Almendras and Elicano are expecting to gross at least twice those of other corn farmers in the region.
The dramatic increase in yield from both farms were attributed by Almendras and Elicano to the planting of the ADVANTA Maize Doble variety of hybrid seeds combined with Masinag organic farming technology developed by Filipino scientists.
“The most important development related to the experiences in the Almendras and Elicano farms, is that, we have had consistent results of harvesting at least 12 tons per hectare although soil conditions are varied,” Herradura said in a separate interview.
This would mean, the system we used that resulted in high yield could be replicated by other farmers anywhere in Mindanao, he added. (With a story by ABE B. BELENA)
