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By Conrad M. Cariño, Senior Desk Editor
There was a time when it was impossible for rice
farmers to become millionaires. But with modern farming technology,
like hybrid seeds, rice farmers have the chance to earn seven
figures annually.
Henry Lim, president of hybrid rice seeds
producer SL Agritech, said that while rice farmers cannot become
millionaires overnight, they can attain such status by going for it
gradually. For starters, they can try to increase their yields per
hectare dramatically.
An example of a rice farmer who is now a
millionaire is a 24-year-old whose 18-hectare farm in Nueva Ecija
earned him P175,000 per hectare for this cropping season alone. The
name of the farmer was not given for security reasons, but his yield
of palay (unhusked rice) per hectare ranges from 10 to 12 metric
tons.
Lim said farmers whose landholdings are between
one to two hectares can start by increasing their yields, and
expanding their landholdings gradually.
“Better earnings will allow rice farmers to
expand their areas and also become millionaires,” he added.
Lim said there are farmers whose landholdings
are small but who earn P70,000 to P90,000 per hectare, per cropping
using hybrid rice technology. He added that if these farmers
increase the areas of their lands to eight or 10 hectares, they can
join the ranks of millionaire farmers.
The average palay yield of irrigated lands in
the country is from three to four metric tons per hectare, per
cropping season. But using the latest technologies, like hybrid
seeds, organic-soil enhancers and integrated pest management, can
boost yields from eight to as much as 17 metric tons, which is the
Philippine record to date.
Xu Weijun, a Chinese who was formerly with the
International Rice Research Institute and now with SL Agritech, said
increasing rice yields is just a matter of harnessing the right
technology.
And surprisingly, the type of hybrid farming
being advocated by Weijun includes the use of integrated pest
management, where the use of pesticides is just a last resort in
containing pests. Under that system, a rice field is treated like an
ecosystem, where pests are controlled by their natural predators,
which include insects and animals like frogs. Integrated pest
management saves farmers between 10 percent to 35 percent in
production costs.
Weijun said that of the many types of seeds used
to boost rice production, hybrid seeds have proved their worth. It
is also worth noting that a Chinese who was a recipient of the Ramon
Magsaysay Award in 2001, professor Yuan Long Ping, is the
acknowledged “father of hybrid rice farming.”
Lim was able to convince Ping, considered a
“national treasure” in China, to transfer hybrid rice farming
technology to the Philippines.
Weijun said it was Ping’s hybrid rice
technology that made China self-sufficient in the staple, to a point
that “excess” rice fields were converted to forests and lakes.
In Asia, the only countries using hybrid rice
technology are China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Surprisingly, Thailand still uses inbred rice varieties, which
explains why its per-hectare yield is lower at 2.1 metric tons.
Thailand, however, has 9.7 million hectares of rice farms, which
explains why it can export the grain.
The Philippines has more than 3.5 million
hectares of lands planted to rice of which less than 10 percent use
hybrid technology. President Gloria Arroyo has included the mass
propagation of hybrid and certified seeds under her P43.7-billion
program to boost farm productivity.
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