(EID-028) “FOCUSING ON THE FARM SECTOR”

Newspaper reports say that our economic growth does not benefit the poor, and the government is urged to focus on the farm sector. While there is no good news in hearing that the benefits of growth hardly goes down, it is good to hear that the needs of the farm sector are now being brought forward as a national issue.

One does not have to be a genius to realize that our farmers are not making money now, because their costs of production are too high, while the farm gate prices that are being offered to them are too low. Their high cost of production is complicated by their high costs of financing, further made difficult by their low margins of profit.

Even if the government will focus on the farm sector as it is being urged, nothing much could happen not unless the economics of farm production are changed, in such a way that it is turned around, meaning that the costs of production are made lower, and the farm gate prices are made higher.

Thanks to the innovation of a Filipino engineer, we now have a local technology that could definitely lower the costs of our farm production, at the same time potentially increasing the gate prices of farm outputs, due to the higher qualities that the technology could make possible.

And here’s the real good news. The said innovator, Engineer Walther Alvarez, has now joined SamaKabuhayan (SAMAKA), a member organization of the United National Integrated Development Alliance (UNIDA), to spread the technology to all farmers, so that their economic destinies could change for the better.

So simple and yet so brilliant, the technology enables poultry and livestock to fully digest the proteins in their diet, so much so that the farmers would not only be able to reduce their costs of feeds, it will also fast track their time to revenue, as the chickens grow to market size in 32 days instead of 45, and the hogs grow to market size in 4 months instead of 6.

As an added advantage, the technology completely removes the odor from the animal wastes, because of the complete absence of undigested protein, the waste matter that breeds bacteria and causes decay. As a result, the animal wastes immediately become usable as organic fertilizers, adding another source of savings for the farmers. Since the meats, fruits and vegetables produced are 100% organic, these could fetch better prices.