To understand what permaculture is, a visit to the UP Open University permaculture garden in Los Baños, Laguna is a good start.
Last January, our coffee farming colleagues and I trekked to UPOU to appreciate how a small garden respects what Nature has already designed. There, we found many kinds of flowers the bees can feed on, we found lowland vegetables that easily grow in backyard plots and a tree with leaves you can eat in times of extreme food crisis or shortage of other vegetables.
There are honey bee colony boxes for pollinating flowers and clay pots that deliver water slowly to plants, making it easy to ensure constant water supply or irrigation. This is a typical backyard permaculture demo farm and also a regenerative farming model.
Regenerative agriculture is the term for activities that produce food in a circular manner (like the circular economy) instead of the usual agriculture practices which are extractive. The Industrial Revolution of the last 40 years has taught farmers to just extract from the soil, rather than return excess leaves and mulch. It used to be that soil was not tilled and farmers just allowed weeds to co-exist with new plants.
The advent of commercial fertilizers and weed killers changed all that. So the soil became tired, acidic and not suitable to plant on without chemical fertilizers to replace what Nature could do for free. It became a vicious cycle – which now we are trying and hoping to repair with permaculture.
A young scientist, Jabez Flores, who has taken his graduate studies in permaculture design, toured us around the UPOU beaming with pride. Dr. Jabez is a passionate advocate of circularity and permaculture because he sees what industrial farming has done to our environment. How does he see all this? He is a drone operator, a licensed one, who sees how human behavior has changed the landscape of cities and adjoining towns.
He can see how Metro Manila is like a big “gash” that, like a wound, is enlarging to include nearby towns in its being “citified” – removing trees and natural flora and fauna because of urbanization.
He tells us that he is scared we are losing our greenscapes fast and soon we will have to go farther and farther from the city to be with Nature. A drone is used in his case to study migratory patterns of people, which includes use of cars and other polluting vehicles. Where people keep moving in droves, farms and agriculture areas disappear.
So, as a scientist, Dr. Jabez encourages people to help Nature repopulate forests and farms through permaculture design. Working with Nature will ensure the biodiversity we need to keep the climate cooler for starters.
Aside from drones that look at cities from above, Dr. Jabez also looks at the ground below. Water tables are getting polluted because of chemicals seeping through the soil from runoffs. In Laguna, for example, they have found arsenic in the soil and water system. Arsenic is colorless and is invisible to the naked eye. But it is toxic and this can infect water systems like a virus.
But do the people know? They don’t know their local water sources are slowly killing them. Thanks to people like Dr. Jabez who went the extra mile to have their community water tested. Have you tested your water at home? Or do you just resign and buy mineral water from outside? Maybe it’s time you did what Dr. Jabez did – test your water.
Everyday I hear stories of communities becoming less agricultural because of changes in people’s habits. The advent of technology can also be responsible for our declining interest in agriculture. Children these days prefer to look at gadgets than at the phases of the moon or the magic of sunrise and sunset.
It used to be that people marked the setting of the sun as a signal to say start walking home from the forest. The setting of the sun also meant it was time for supper or dinner. Sunrise was a signal to start our day in the fields and start walking to school.
But today kids use the alarm clock on their gadgets, then read the news on the same device. It truly has changed how we run our lives.
So, how do we correct the continuous decline in forest areas, decline in the interest in agriculture and general non-interest in growing our own food? We have to nurture kids who have a penchant for science and encourage them to discover new creative ways to return Nature to what it used to be. We have to develop curiosity in children so they can experiment, discover and maybe find new ways to restore Nature to how it was before. Curious students will become the scientists we so need to correct the damage our past generations and today’s generation are causing further and continuous harm to Nature.
It takes a scientist with a heart to care about his community and Mother Nature in general. And thanks to people like Flores we may just save our farms from being infected by bad water and save our forests by constantly viewing them from above, using his drones.
Where does passion start and science begin? Dr. Jabez started with coffee and actually started a coffee shop in Laguna. But that is not how I met him. I met him because he graced the graduation of our Organic Agriculture class in December and learned about his interest in drones – not to pry into people’s lives, but to use it to know what we can do to restore balance and harmony in Nature. I really admire his use of technology to benefit science.
If you want to hear more from Dr. Jabez, tune in to our podcast where he discusses how we can all benefit from thinking of and being with Nature.