Women As Head Farmers: Calling For A Village Revolt!

MANILA: I do not subscribe to gender equality; I want gender bias, and that is why, for the liberation of farm families from poverty, I'm calling for a revolution for and by women in the countryside: Let us enshrine the women as head farmers at the expense of the men!

The men have failed too often and too much. The farm family will never rise above poverty if the dominance of the men over farming activities continue, if they go on being the businessmen they are not good at. They have no business dictating the farm business; under them, there has been no emancipation from poverty in the last 100 years, and that's too long. It is time that women took over the beasts of burden, animals and machines, and show the world that the female is the better sex.

Women in the Philippines. Tomorrow, Wednesday, as I revise this, 13 January 2016, we are going to Mulanay town in the Bondoc Peninsula in the Bicol Region where an all-women group, the Rural Improvement Club in that municipality, has shown that the raising of native swine makes very good business. Rather, it's the women who make native swine very good business. I read about them in an online article of 2013 and I want to write about the ladies 3 years later after a personal visit.

Too, the female farmers' experiences in Africa and India as reported by the ICRISAT over the years are more than enough to show the Filipino ladies in the countryside how they can be heads of family farms.

Women in Kenya. The women farmers of Kenya learned from the field days held at the ICRISAT research station in Kiboko and applied that knowledge so well that they began to call pigeon pea "our dryland coffee," that is to say, they transformed pigeonpea raising into a business that was now as rewarding as growing coffee, by turning it into fresh vegetable pigeon pea. The women farmers also began to call green peas "our beef," alluding to the high price it commands, almost twice that of dry peas. Good prices from good produce. How successful were the women? Jane Mulinge, mother of 8, was expanding her 4 acres to 6 acres in the next season. Priscilla Mutie, another mother of 8, learned that 1 bag of her pigeon pea can buy 2 bags of maize, very pretty. Remember, with pigeon pea you can harvest many times; with maize, you harvest only once.

Women in Bangladesh. Don't forget that it was first the women in Bangladesh who started to make the Grameen Revolution of micro-credit the worldwide success that it continues to be.

Women in India. In India, the MS Swaminathan Foundation has empowered women to grow the hybrid pigeon peas of ICRISAT and produce seeds economically so that small farmers can afford to buy them. So now 85% of the world's supply of pigeon pea beans is in the hands of Indian women!

Pigeon pea is difficult to cultivate, says PAN Germany OISAT; that is because in the past the varieties were susceptible to pests and diseases. When ICRISAT,  based in India, then under Director General William Dar, introduced new varieties through field days in Kiboko, Kenya, the women took the risk when the men would not. When I wrote about this, I said:

Whom the gods wish to employ, first they make female. What happened was that the women of Emali, near Kiboko, turned out to be more enterprising farmers than the men; they took the lead in growing the new ICRISAT pigeonpea varieties. Enterprising means you are willing to take some risks; why is it that more of the women took the risk and less of the men? It must have been that more of the women thought more of the food while more of the men thought more of the risk. The weaker stomach takes the lesser risk.

In May 2009, there was this frightening news carried by CNN that said, "India's farmers cursed with severe drought." The monsoons were delayed and the rainfall was below normal. ICRISAT's Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics (VASAT) and the women of Adarsha came to the rescue – the ladies of Adarsha village brought the concerns of farmers to the scientists of ICRISAT via information & communication technology (the essence of VASAT), and the farming survived the problematic drought. Knowledge when given and applied at the right time can only be science at its best helping people help themselves. Don't forget the women were there.

And so it is that some African and Indian women have made great differences in the lives of their own families and those of others, that I want to perpetuate this truth and encourage the women at the countryside in my country the Philippines to demand that the government recognize them as the better half when it comes to finances and assist them in taking over the business side of their family farms.

The head farmers must be the women because the men as head have been ignoring mind-numbing truths in farming such as the one I'm about to reveal; and this has been true in the last 50 years, or since I graduated from the College of Agriculture (UP Los Baños) in 1965. The data is unbelievable; the numbers are shocking! But if you don't believe in the reality of Climate Change, you cannot be stunned by the figures I am now going to present and my computations.

The contentious Paris Agreement was for containing carbon dioxide emissions; they were barking up the wrong tree! Carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas, and I'm going to prove it now. So, from France, we go to the US. According to the US EPA, the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide has a warming impact 300 times that of carbon dioxide. Surprised? Not yet. Fertilizer accounts for more than 85% of nitrous oxide emitted to the atmosphere according to the US Energy Information Administration. Nitrous oxide comes from nitrogenous fertilizers.

What do the numbers I have just cited mean? Because of over-fertilization, the major culprits for global warming are not the vehicle owners or the industry operators; it's the farmers, the fertilizer appliers. (Oh yes, so far, I'm the only one saying it's the farmers who are to be blamed more for global warming than the industries, vehicle owners, and destroyers of forests. If you want to argue, go build a blog and I'll see you in your dedicated place.)

From the US, we go to the Philippines. There are 4.4 million ha of riceland in my country; the American company Pioneer (a Dupont business) recommends for rice 14 bags in the dry season, 13 in the wet; Filipino farmers plant rice 2 times a year. Being a consultant of the Department of Agrarian Reform for the last 2 years, I know for a fact that farmers apply those many bags of fertilizer. Now, if I assume only 3 million ha as being fertilized, from the Pioneer table of recommendations, I compute 42 million bags of fertilizers applied yearly in these islands alone in a year. Can you imagine that?! At P1,000/bag, in pesos, that's P42 Billion! Almost US $1 Billion. How much money is that? If I earned P1 million a month, it will take me 3,500 years to earn that gigantic pile of money.

And more than half (51.7%) of the fertilizer contents of those bags is nitrogen within bags of complete fertilizer, urea, ammonium nitrate and ammonium phosphate. What else but sources of nitrous oxide. Now you know where most of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is coming from and to whom most of the dollars go. The higher the fertilizer rate, the higher the greenhouse gas emission, the higher the fertilizer companies get. Who said climate change isn't doing anyone any good?

Now, here's another shock. We're still on the subject of fertilizers for crops.

This time I introduce you to microdosing, the fertilizer technique developed by ICRISAT, also at that time under the leadership of William Dar. If you didn't know, ICRISAT is an international sister institute of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines. I know because I have been writing of ICRISAT in the last 9 years, and a little about IRRI, as an advocate of intelligent agriculture. Microdosing, micro, small doses; think Ilocano and you get the idea. In microdosing, you apply only a bottlecap-full of fertilizer per hill; you don't spray-broadcast like the image above shows (from ccstechnologies.in), where you lose so much fertilizer. In microdosing, I estimate that the farmer will save 9 bags of fertilizer for every 10 bags he would have otherwise used! The farmer would be saving P25,000 every year, which is a king's ransom in the villages. If you have 3 million farmers saving that much, that's P75 billion ($1.7 billion) saved.

Savings is income. What would the men as head farmers do with such savings in their hands? At once, they will rejoice and be glad in it, drink to it, raising their hands and toasting to each other's health and wealth.

In contrast, what would the women as head farmers do instead? At once, they would think of family first. And that's why I would love if millions of women were head farmers, because with such savings, they would be raising their hands and blessing their families.