Caching The Rain

MANILA: Catch me if you can!

Yes, I said purposely, "Caching the rain." I did not say, "Catching the rain." But in a little while, I will be showing how you yourself can be:

Catching the rain first.
Caching the rain next.
Cashing in on the rain finally.

Climate change is bringing us El Niño this year and, according to our weather bureau, Pagasa (Hope), we can expect erratic wet days as well as erratic dry (ANN, 11 March 2015, web.pagasa.dost.gov.ph). So we will not hope but we can expect hot and cold days unlike before.

How do you catch the rain for your crops?

Maybe not you but the rest of the world has been learning from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) about water harvesting using little dams and catch basins. This is the Adarsha success story of which I have written many times in my 7 books published by ICRISAT (try my essay, "Africa Feeding Africa. 'Africa needs CGIAR' & The African Equation," 08 November 2014, ICRISAT Watch, blogspot.com). In the village of Adarsha, they have irrigation for the crops; they have water underground; they have crops and trees aboveground.

In the Philippines, we also have small water impoundments based on a public law. But we don't have success stories like that of ICRISAT's Adarsha, the watershed in a valley that the villagers themselves built.

Nonetheless, I know of a very simple trick to catch the rain, all that moisture that crops need for a given season, and I call it The New Organic (see my previous essay, "The New Organic. It's A Revolution!" 08 June 2015, The New Organic, blogspot.com).

The organic topsoil that anyone can have is not God-given but man-caused. The building of the organic topsoil is the one I refer to as The New Organic. The old organic farming refers to building up the organic matter content of the soil by way of adding organic fertilizer like compost.

But the simple step I know is to build your organic topsoil right where your field is. If you don't have an organic topsoil, the rain comes, the rain goes. It shatters your topsoil, and drains off almost right away, and carries off soil particles and nutrients. Why do you allow the rain to do that?

The New Organic becomes The New Revolution, like I said in my earlier essay. It raises organic agriculture to a new level, as it proposes one simple technology that is the essence of it, the building of the organic topsoil.

Is my theory of The New Organic new? Yes and no. I must acknowledge my intellectual debts to Edward H Faulkner's theory & practice of soil development that I read in the mid-1960s, as well as the ideas of Albert Howard (An Agricultural Testament, 1940), JI Rodale (organic gardening, 1940), Lady Eve Balfour (The Living Soil, 1943), and Ruth Stout (Gardening Without Work, 1963).

The New Organic redefines organic agriculture in that it presents this simple concept:

The organic topsoil is the essence of organic farming.

When you have an organic topsoil, where does the rain go? Into the soil, into the humus, which can hold water up to 500 times its own weight! (compostguide.com). And which releases that water to your crops; doesn't it also release water to your weeds? In fact, the organic topsoil prevents weeds from growing because, in the first place, when you chop & mix vegetation and soil as you do when you rotavate the field, the weed seeds will decompose along with the rest of the organic matter.

Yes, rotavation is the type of plowing that will help you build your organic topsoil in the most practical way possible. But it must be as I prescribe it, that is: Cut your crop refuse and soil only as deep as 2 inches or so, so that the cuts of vegetation mix well with the cuts of the soil – the beginning of your organic topsoil.

Isn't this all theoretical? Yes, it sounds like that, because I am the only one saying it, and while I'm a graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture and therefore an agriculturist, I'm not a practicing farmer. But, like I said before (in my essay cited above), the name The New Organic is new but the practice is old, as my cousin Aida Castillo's husband Lorenzo Casasus has been practicing it for the last 50 years, and he tells me that his neighbors have been copying his methods, which includes non-spraying against pests, but they have not noticed how he begins to cultivate his field (and he hasn't told them how). When you use the hand tractor (kuliglig) in the field, you look exactly like every other farmer, except that under The New Organic, instead of plowing down to 8 inches, you cut the soil down only to about 2 inches, which effectively creates a soil compost layer as you go about your business. In a little while, you have your humus. The cache is the hiding place; it is also that which is stored in a hard-to-reach place. The humus is the cache in the soil, the one that will catch the rain for your crops, the one which you can cash in.

The image above shows what is not caching the rain, as the rice crop refuse remains standing and is not incorporated into the topsoil and therefore there is no humus that will catch the water and cache the rain in itself (my original photograph was taken 24 February 2013 at 1549 hours with a Lumix FZ100 with a Leica lens).

The organic topsoil as I have described is the only way to catch the rain, cache the water, and cash in on the liquid that drops from the heavens above all at the same time – you will save on water, weed control, fertilizers, pesticides, and nutrients in your healthy crops that are healthy for you.

And so it is; full of fauna and flora, bacteria and fungi, bugs and worms, the organic topsoil is a healthy soil that makes a healthy crop that makes a healthy harvest that makes a healthy meal. Isn't healthy what farming is all about?