DA trains technicians to teach over 500,000 farmers this year

MANILA, Philippines - The Department of Agriculture (DA) is training 4,320 agricultural technicians this year at the local government level. The technicians are taking lessons on palay check technology, lowland vegetables and rootcrops, and organic fertilizer production, and other environment-friendly farming practices.

The DA is hoping to teach the new technologies to over a half-million farmers nationwide by the end of the wet crop season.

In a report to Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, Asterio Saliot, director of the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI), said the training of the technicians will be done in 144 batches between March and July this year.

The 4,320 trainees comprise the bulk of the 6,120 agricultural technicians covered by the DA program.

Saliot said the technicians will, in turn, train over 500,000 farmers in field schools located in the 2,600 clusters or sites where the DA plans to channel the bulk of its funds this year.

Under the program, 60 batches comprising 1,800 trainors were trained from November to December last year.

The ATI is conducting hands-on training workshops in its centers as well as in the facilities of the DA and the local government units (LGUs) all over the country, Saliot said.

The training in farmers’ field schools began last December and will go on till October this year.

Besides providing training on organic fertilizer manufacturing, Saliot said the ATI is also teaching trainors on new technologies such as Palay Check” to boost the production of palay. The ATI is also teaching trainors in new technologies for vegetables and root crops.

The 1,800 agricultural technicians who completed training in 2008 will, in turn, train 80,997 participants in farmers field schools from the December 2008 to March 2009 dry cropping season, and another 439,123 farmers this year also under the same program.

The training project is in line with the DA’s new policy to direct most of the DA’s funds to “hard” projects like irrigation maintenance and post-harvest facilities along with rural extension work, rather than on “soft” initiatives like fertilizer or seed support.

As part of its policy overhaul, the DA is training small farmers in 48 below-average, palay-producing provinces on how to produce their own organic fertilizer.

In lieu of the fertilizer discount coupons that the DA gave out last year to farmer-beneficiaries in partnership with LGUs, Yap said the DA would provide organic fertilizer manufacturing support to farmers in 2,600 clusters or sites.

Organic fertilizer manufacturing support and other intervention measures would be channeled to the 2,600 clusters  to rapidly boost palay harvests by raising up to the national average of 3.8 MT — or higher — the per-hectare outputs in these relatively low-yielding provinces.