Ways of nature and the stars in organic farming

Early in the 1900’s, the American colonial government set up their station here to escape the heat of Manila. The Chinese settlers then knew Americans love green salads and started cultivating vegetable gardens using secret organic methods. An industry was born.
Peasants of old also farmed seeking guidance through spiritual beliefs, the seasons and the phases of the moon.
In the early 1960’s, the era of chemical farming arrived and became the norm of conventional farming and wiped out the old wisdom of farming.
Decades later, the industry was in shambles as the soil became infertile and pests went out of control because of the excessive use of chemical inputs. The apparent demise of the vegetable industry loom over the region and farmers and the local government scrambled to find a niche in an ever changing and highly competitive market.
From the problems of conventional farming evolved practices reclaiming nature’s way and ‘farming by the stars’, or sustainable agriculture.
Pat Acosta, who owns and manages The Master’s Garden, popularized organic farming, introducing Effective Microganisms-1 (EM-1) as a composting agent and soil conditioner.
Acosta says that EM-1, an all-natural certified organic product, evolved in Japan and has been in use all over the world for 50 years now. In the early 1980’s, a horticulture professor at the University of Ryuku, Dr. Teruo Higa, popularized an EM-1 formula that includes lactic acid bacteria, phototropic purple nonsulfur bacteria and yeast for agriculture use.
EM-1 hastens composting of garden debris, a strategy Acosta successfully employed in his garden that soon turned into a model farm. It is said that continuous use of EM-1 can convert soil to a sustainable or zymogenic soil.
Farmers with a quest for higher principles in farming and a need to improve their incomes were inspired with the success of Acosta’s farm and went to him for training.
In 2005, then mayor of La Trinidad, Nestor Fongwan (now Benguet governor), consulted Acosta on organic farming to help propagate a brand of healthy vegetables and save the ailing agriculture industry in La Trinidad, also known as the Salad Bowl of the Philippines.
The meeting gave rise to the La Trinidad Organic Producers cooperative (LATOP), with an initial 26 members. LATOP has 72 members, mostly trained by Acosta who has trained some 500 farmers to this day.
Acosta mixes a tablespoon of EM-1 and a tablespoon of molasses with one liter of water. The mixture is cultured for seven days. Twenty-five milliliters of the culture is then mixed to a liter of water and sprayed for composting plant cuttings. Acosta says that the mix remains active longer if distilled water is used. In as little as two weeks or so, the compost is ready for use.
Acosta raises a caveat on indigenous microorganisms because one can’t really tell what is in the mix. “It’s important to know what exactly is going to your soil,” he said. Acosta said one could simply gather soil from rock crevices or virgin forests and treat it with the same formula for EM-1. “But then again, who can tell just what is in that soil.” He cautions for instance that trichoderma, now promoted as an agriculture microorganism, is a carbon-hungry organism that can eat a wooden house.
Acosta, a gentleman farmer, is the first and only certified practitioner in the Cordillera region by the internationally-recognized Organic Certification Center of the Philippines.
Felix Tan was a Quantum Medicine practitioner before he turned to organic gardening. Tan calls himself a “successful disciple” of Acosta, who helped him set up his farm, the Garden of Life, where he grows wheat grass among other salad vegetables.
The juice of wheat grass is called a super-food that contains an acid that is poison to cancer cells. Tan grows his wheat grass for 30 days when the grass reaches its “jointing stage, just before flowering, and when nutrients are at peak.”
Acosta and Tan are just two of LATOP’s farmers who are regularly attending to customers (doctors, housewives and health buffs) during market days to explain the nutritive value of their products. A LATOP seal is a stamp of high standards in organic farming.
Bio-Dynamic (BD) farming was launched in 1924 by European philosopher Rudolf Steiner, founder of the science of the spirit, Anthroposophy. BD is based on the principle that ethereal invisible life forms and cosmic rhythms influence the life of plants.
Greg Kitma, a known BD practitioner in the region in the last 13 years, trained under Nicanor Perlas, a 1994 UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) awardee in sustainable agriculture.
Special preparations are a key to BD farming, and trained farmers were dismayed at the start because the materials were imported from the US at P20,000 a kilo each.
Perlas names the BD preparations in a training manual to include BD 500, 501 and six herbs that help make excellent compost namely, yarrow flowers, to regulate potash; chamomile flowers for calcium; stinging nettle to regulate calcium, potassium and iron; oak tree bark for plants to grow more seeds and dandelion flowers to help regulate “life forces of the cosmos.” Perlas also names BD 508 made of horsetail, a plant abundant in Benguet, to fight diseases.
Kitma trained in Australia upon the invitation of Alex Podolinsky who developed BD in Australia. Through this experience Kitma acquired the knowledge to make the preparations himself.
BD 500 is cow manure. Kitma gathers this fresh from a female cow and puts it in cow horn as the winter equinox begins (September 20 in the Southern Hemisphere) and buries it for six months. Steiner explained in his lecture that the earth is most inwardly alive in winter. All that is living is stored in this manure, thus we get a highly concentrated life force. This activates the life-giving forces in soil.
Kitma has effectively combined BD 500 and the six-herb preparations into one, and supplies the formula to serious BD farmers for P75 per hectare. He charges the same for BD 501. “The cost is just to sustain production, Kitma explained, adding that the preparations cannot be commercialized as this may give way to fraud in the form of deceptive preparations. BD 501 is made of quartz crystals and increases the ability of the leaves to absorb light and gives more taste, aroma and color to plants.
Bio-dynamic requires humus, which is like jelly that holds the nutrients in it and does not leach out the soil.
The bio-dynamic farmer looks at a plant in relation to the four elements—earth, water, sun and air. Podolinsky describes plants as children of the sun as its warmth signals to the plant when to feed and when to rest. Transpiration of a plant in leaf is what breathing is to humans, and must take in water all the time. Feed and water intake are two different processes, where dark bigger roots are like water pipes and finer white roots are feeder roots that heed the sun when to take nitrogen from humus.
When the plant feeds—inspired by the sun—it takes only the right amount of nutrients from the soil and nitrogen is transformed into high-quality protein. But if artificial nitrogen such as urea is applied, which may be much more than the original nitrogen soil moisture, the plant is forced to take the nitrogen through water feeding roots, thus flushing it with nitrates. According to Podolinsky, the nitrate that is not absorbed turns into nitrite, and as such is a deadly poison.
Podolinsky describes it as a plant asking, “If I release the water, will the salt kill me?” and thus does not transpire water and results in huge crops. Nitrate poisoning has been documented to cause “blue babies” among other disorders.
The sowing calendar classifies root, leaf, flower and fruit plants, in relation to when the moon and planets have their strongest influence on plants. “Node days,” the point when the path of the moon and that of the sun cross, which happen twice a month, are marked as days when one must not sow seeds.
Steiner marveled at the miracle of the plant, the mediator between cosmic light and the darkness of the earth. As a result of BD practices, healthy plants full of the vitality of life forces are produced.
Kitma continues to give training on BD. This month, he is opening up Bokod for BD training of 40 farmers. There are now 200 hectares in the country devoted to BD.
Initiatives such as LATOP and BD in the region become significant in the light of studies that show the ill-effects of pesticides on organic health. In 2007, Green Peace International detected nitrates in artesian wells of Buguias and Atok where there are intensive farming activities.
Benguet is feeding a large population with its vegetables. Records of the Provincial Agriculturist Office show that Benguet produces an average of 756,656 metric tons of crops yearly and Metro Manila consumes 80 percent of the produce.