Piñol Sees The Rise Of Rice, But Drying Rice Is All Wet!

MANILA: Through the front-view mirror of Solid North Bus 1608 coming from Asingan going to Cubao, I took the photograph Sunday, 09 October 2016 at 0757 hours somewhere in Tarlac. Rice drying poorly on the shoulders of the highway. If you can't get to 14% moisture content, you rice is wet and will sell poorly.

The photograph is perfect, if I may say so myself: It suggests 3 things actually, literally and figuratively.

1, The sunlit part of the road reminds us that the rice farmer has no problem drying his palay under the sun on a public road, except of course passing vehicles when they have to take the shoulder of the road either side to maneuver. Actually, he has no other choice.

2, The shaded part of the road reminds us that the rice farmer has a problem drying his palay either (a) under the sun because the sun is hiding and there is not enough sunshine to heat the grains and evaporate the unwanted moisture in them, or (b) when it suddenly rains, as it does often these days.

3, Where I am on the front passenger seat on the right with my Lumix FZ100 superzoom digital camera, the partly visible bus is running and passing all those palay grains being dried left and right, as well as those still in the sacks awaiting to be taken out and spread on the warm concrete. The bus reminds me of the DA running Philippine agriculture.

Elsewhere, Secretary Piñol is happy to post on Facebook what Ben Kritz has written in The Manila Times dated 30 September 2016 – there is no online link given to that newspaper – that 51-year old Edgardo Marcelo, a Guimba, Nueva Ecija farmer, has come up with a record harvest of 16.63 metric tons of rice in his 1.3-hectare farm using the hybrid rice variety SL-8H using mostly organic fertilizers, mainly chicken manure. That's equivalent to 12.8 tons/ha, really a very high figure for a harvest. Marcelo had a net income of about P182,000 from a gross of P225,000.

That was the dry season. The formula was: SL-8H seeds + 10 bags of organic fertilizer + "small amounts" (no exact figure given) of inorganic fertilizers: N at 46%, K at 60% and NPK at 14-14-14%. Naturally and proudly, SL Agritech Corp Chair Henry Lim said Marcelo's success with SL-8H "should encourage more farmers to venture into hybrid rice, applying their traditional but superior farming practices to achieve greater yields."

Marcelo said the DA assisted him by subsidizing his seed cost to P2,300/bag, a 50% discount from the market price. It is remarkable that, he said, his total organic fertilizer cost was only P2,200 while his total inorganic fertilizer cost was almost P15,000. The higher volume cost less, the lower volume cost more. This is also a lesson for farmers to use less chemical fertilizers and more organic fertilizers if they want to cut costs by so much.

I can imagine similar volumes of harvests with the use of other hybrid rice varieties from other sources. And so, optimistically, as the title of Ben Kritz' report says, without the linking verb, I say, "Rice sufficiency is achievable."

But I see a problem:

Suppose hundreds of thousands of farmers suddenly demanded organic fertilizers and nobody can supply them? That would be denying those farmers the right to their own bountiful harvests, wouldn't it?

And I see another problem. I'm really worried about something else. Let me now go back to the Solid North bus I'm riding and the scenes of rice spread on the shoulders of the road to dry.

Solid North Bus 1608 is notrunning fast, as according to company policy – just as Philippine agriculture is running moderately, as according to the policies of Secretary Manny Piñol. Truth to tell, I don't want my bus speeding, but I want the aggie bus speeding. And I'm not talking about the dangers of climate change hurrying us up to adapt.

Speed is of the essence here, because this is harvest time for rice and we must save all the rice grains we have produced so far if we want the country to be self-sufficient in rice at least.

That is why I'm saying the aggie bus should be running very fast along the road to food sufficiency.

Right now, I'm afraid the aggie bus is running too slow to catch up with the times. I can see that it is not speeding up, and I have yet to read of a Department of Agriculture (DA) plan to accelerate the growth of agriculture in these islands.

I can see that the drying of rice is all wet!

Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of farmers drying their palay along all those roads and all available basketball courts and auditoriums? Think of the postharvest losses.

Yes, we are going to lose much of our abundant rice harvest this time if we do not produce enough rice dryers within this month and next, October and November. Look at my image again. Then take note that farmers all over the country have only a limited number of dryers because the DA has not foreseen the need for hundreds or thousands of them at this time, this year and even the last one. In my hometown of Asingan of 6,700 ha planted mostly to rice, I haven't seen or heard of one dryer.

You have a bountiful harvest of 12.8 tons/ha, or 256 cavans of palay, but you could lose at least 15% of that (dirp3.pids.gov.ph) and as high as 34% (books.google.com.ph). Let's just take 20%, and that is 51 cavans – at P20/kilo, the farmer would lose P51,000/ha, a king's ransom!

In fact, Manny Piñol saw and tried a solar bubble dryer at IRRI in Los Baños on 06 July 2016, according to the DA website (da.gov.ph), so the technology is not strange to him. Therefore, the next move is his.

To produce the dryers in no time at all, my unsolicited advice is for the DA to consult IRRI about the bubble dryer that was a product of partnership with a private concern, GrainPro, with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and German International Cooperation(irri.org). It's called a bubble because the transparent polyethylene cover is expanded by the air blown by ventilators to dry the grains.

The device can dry 1 ton of palay at a single load in 1-2 days, depending on whether it's sunny or rainy (irri.org). That's running very efficiently and very fast!

GrainPro has 2 models: Solar Bubble Dryer and Electric Bubble Dryer. The first works by storing the sun's energy on a solar panel; the second works with electricity when there is no sunshine available. A battery charger is also available. And yes, the dryer can safely dry any farm produce. Both are transportable: packed, the solar model weighs 57 kg and the electric model 48 kg (grainpro.com). GrainPro has a Subic Bay facility where training can be held.

I'm not in any way connected with GrainPro, but I'm endorsing their bubble dryer enthusiastically. Also, I love their slogan:

Storing the future.

That is a lesson for the Philippine Department of Agriculture under Secretary Manny Piñol. We have to store the future. We have bountiful rice harvests? The future is now! @

11 October 2016. Essay word count, excluding this line: 1234