The municipality of Tubungan, Iloilo has strengthened its initiatives to promote organic agriculture among farmers.
Tubungan Municipal Agriculturist Marjorie Tacardon said they have adopted organic farming in order to produce safe and healthy food.
“We value quality over quantity in our food production. Through organic farming, we could produce safe food to consume for a healthier and longer life,” she said.
Tacardon said there is also a need to protect the environment, citing Republic Act 10068 that mandates the conversion of at least five percent of the agricultural areas into organic farms.
The Tubungan Vegetable Producers Association (TVPA), which initially had 45 members, started to venture into organic farming in 2012, underscoring the need to gradually transform their areas to boost production of safe food and to avert further damage in the environment caused by the oblivious application of synthetic inputs.
Through training from the Department of Agriculture (DA) on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), this further ignited the farmers’ willingness to refrain from chemical farming.
Meanwhile, TVPA president Antonio Tadiaque said that they have engaged farmer adopters in the municipality and have grown organic vegetables and even poultry animals.
“We grow vegetables, lettuce, pechay, black rice, livestock , and poultry animals organically in more than 100 hectares of farm areas in Tubungan by almost 200 local organic farming adopters,” he said.
To sustain the agency’s efforts in persuading farmers to shift into organic practices, the local agriculture office in Tubungan led by former Municipal Agriculturist Ma. Asuncion Tabucuran broadened farmers’ grasp of technologies through the series of training.
Likewise, they had distributed farm inputs such as organic seeds and fertilizers to farmers and adopters.DA-RAFIS6/JSC/LTP/PIA6 Iloilo
