Small is beautiful

For someone who never had a province to call home or a second home, I always wanted to travel to other places in search of a place that I could call just that – a second home. One place of course is Amadeo, Cavite where we now have a small herb garden and a demo farm for coffee.

In the North many occasions have brought us to Benguet, whether it is for sourcing coffee or for sharing what we know with food producers. Back in 2004 we also would go on tree planting tours and coffee harvest trips in a less popular town called Tublay. The late Gina Lopez of ABS-CBN Foundation fame invited us to reconnect with the organic town a few years ago, as part of her iLove Foundation outreach.

A more popular town is La Trinidad, known for strawberry fields, a public market teeming with vegetables from far away towns and the Benguet State University. And lately, this also happens to be a destination for coffee farm tours. A young couple in their 40s hosts baristas for a two-day farm immersion at Mudaan Ni Pamilja (Family Farm), where they teach the coffee brewers where this prized crop comes from, how it is processed, how it becomes the beans they work with everyday. That is the first day’s coverage. The second day is real immersion as they perform tasks in the farm a coffee producer would do as routine – prune trees, collect mulch, clean the farm, etc.

This is a good model for other crops – let people into your farms and ask them to work with you while they learn. If you host 10-15 people, that’s free labor in exchange for learnings which they will treasure for life. I think this could be done in cacao, coconut and most other high value crops – get extra hands for free and you get paid for it. The couple entertains at least two groups a month, and this already gives them extra income, besides the regular coffee sales they generate.

Farmers like Allan and Cathy work a hectare of farm all by their lonesome. They have no help and this is the case with most farms at the cut-up size of one hectare or less. To economists, it is totally unproductive and inefficient to work a small farm. But for couples like them, it is a joyful experience to have income from almost anything in this diversified organic farm.

They have fruit trees, some flowers and even the lowly mayana which spreads like crazy when he used a grass cutter. During the pandemic, each pot of mayana could fetch P75 to P200. They sold so much mayana, enough to  acquire a new laptop for business needs!  That’s from what he would have cut like grass, but grew to become their “fortune” plant.

Over in Tublay, just a few minutes from Mudaan, we met Venia, a joyful lady who works her farm alone. She definitely finds joy in growing coffee amongst other productive trees like lemons and pomelo. She works alone but does not mind the labor-intensive farm work. Again, she is in a diversified organic farm with less than two hectares of land. We are now encouraging her to get hired hands for the upcoming coffee harvest through farm immersion trips or even a day-long field trip.

Are coffee farmers the exception? Are all other small farmers owning less than two hectares miserable? This is what I often hear from economists who compute scale, mass production, industrial size farms or, in other words, traditional farming. Commercial farming requires irrigation, hybrid seeds, pesticides and commercial fertilizers. That will involve a lot of money. But when you meet people like Allan, Cathy and Venia you get convinced that small farming is the way to go. They are productive, happy and sustainable, too.

I would recommend to economists to visit a few farms before they make their recommendations to lawmakers on what policies are needed. Sometimes, real life experience is not captured in western textbooks of economics.

The town’s leadership is also as admirable. The mayor gets involved with “out of the box” ideas for eco-tourism, organic food production and bringing resource people like designers for their weavers. The mayor’s wife also told us that an old skill like crocheting keeps the women busy. A millennial then mentioned that today’s young girls are into crocheting as a hobby. History really repeats itself.

The involvement of Tublay with organic practices is spearheaded by its municipal agriculturist who walks the talk. He encourages the planting or sowing only of organic seeds and enables farmers to work their small lands profitably.

This is why I also recommended them to a Germany-based organic association called Naturland (www.naturland.de) for a certification called PGS or Participatory Guarantee System. It is possible to work small like-minded groups such as this farmers’ association introduced to us.

The best part of visiting this place I now also call my second home is the food and drink. We were served freshly boiled sweet potatoes with freshly-brewed local Arabica coffee. At another snack time, we had cassava suman or rice cakes, and for dessert we had a local banana variety called tumok. Green on the outside, yellow and ripe on the inside, this banana is a native variety well worth listing in Slow Food’s Ark of Taste (www.fondazioneslowfood.org).

On our way back to the hotel in Baguio, I looked at our bag of gifts from the farmers – native oranges, native lemons and native guava. And from the short small meetings we had, they made us take home boiled bananas and  cassava suman. What a nice feeling to have friends who are like-minded and carry on despite what economists say is not a productive model.

I agree with Schumacher that “small is beautiful” (E.F.Schumacher, circa 1973) and our learned pencil pushers should start visiting small farms to appreciate his idea, written 50 years ago. History, indeed, repeats itself.