Disease-free plants ready for Negros farmers

By this time (May), about 100,000 tissue-cultured or disease-free banana suckers shall be available to small farmers in Bais City (Negros Oriental), courtesy of the Bais Tissue Culture Laboratory.

The City Agriculturist’s Office (CAO) plans to distribute these seedlings to small farmers in the city’s upland barangays. The CAO is formulating a "plant-now-pay-later" scheme to make the seedlings commercially available (i.e., at P15 per seedling) initially to selected small farmers.

In the meantime, the laboratory continues to propagate different orchid varieties for the local market.

Over the past decade, the Bais City local government unit (LGU) has strived to develop its capability to mass-produce disease-free planting materials for the production of banana, cutflowers, and other potential crops.

Lending a hand all along was the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), which initially provided financial assistance to the city government in 1994 for the setting up of a tissue culture laboratory, the first of its kind in Negros Oriental.

The Bais LGU provided the building and technical and administrative personnel for the project. DOST allocated P440,000 grants-in-aid for the acquisition of equipment and supplies. DOST-Region 7 assisted in the training of laboratory personnel while the DOST-Industrial Technology Development Institute (ITDI) provided orchid planting materials.

The laboratory was inaugurated in February 1996. In May 1996, the CAO started laboratory operation. Since then, the technicians have been propagating orchids and later banana planters (Cavendish, lakatan and bulongan).

In 2002. the DOST finally donated the equipment to the city government. Subsequently, at CAO’s request, the Central Visayas Polytechnic College in Dumaguete Ctiy provided technical assistance for the culture of lakatan.

Now, Bais City is ready to help its farmer-constituents through disease-free planting materials. – Rudy A. Fernandez.