KAPATAGAN, Digos City (MindaNews / 07 July) – Apple, a fruit known to grow in temperate Asian countries like South Korea, Japan and China, thrives well in Kapatagan, a touristy village located within the rolling foothills of Mt. Apo, the Philippines’ tallest peak.
Against all the bashing and discouragement, Benzone Kennedy Sepe has risen tall to cultivate and harvest apples from their family backyard, the first and only known successful apple grower in Mindanao so far.
Ironically, in his younger days, he abhorred farming, recalling the poverty his family had to endure as their parents broke their backs in vegetable cultivation, yet they remained poor.
“Bata pa ko hate na nako ang farming. Nakita nako amoang mga parents wala maayong kita. Lisod among kinabuhi (When I was a kid, I hated farming. I saw our parents not earning well from farming. We lived a difficult life),” the second of three siblings narrated.
Now 32, he made a 180-degree turnaround on such a view – having had a modest new home with a shining car acquired a few years ago parked in its garage.
All because of apples, which no one before thought would grow in Mindanao in the southern part of the Philippines, a largely tropical country.
He spoke last June 30 with MindaNews at their backyard in this village, speaking mostly in Cebuano.
In 2013, Sepe started experimenting if apples could grow in their backyard in Sitio Marawer in Kapatagan, a highland village less than an hour away from población Digos.
From an imported apple he bought from the market, he sowed three seeds that he planted at the back of their house that sits on a 500-square meter property.
Out of the three apple seedlings, only one lived and yielded its first fruits in 2018, or five years after he sowed it.
Sepe and his family treated this apple tree as “their goose that laid the golden eggs,” well-taken care of and which they fondly called “Benzone Apple,” after his first name.
A member of the Foursquare Church, an international evangelical Pentecostal Christian denomination, Sepe’s eagerness to propagate apples in their village was further fueled when he was among the church members chosen for a religious exchange in 2015 in South Korea, where apples grow in abundance.
“I need to replicate these apple orchards back home,” he told himself back then. He stayed for a month in South Korea.
Three years after he came back from Korea and five years after he planted his first apple tree, arming himself with self-research on how to propagate the temperate fruit in a tropical place, Sepe harvested its first fruits in 2018.
Since then he took the venture seriously. He started grafting apple saplings he sold for P3,500 each. Buyers from different parts of Mindanao and other areas in the country, including Nueva Ecija, Abra, Tuguegarao, Laguna, Bulacan and Metro Manila, have bought from him. He sent the orders through couriers.
The cost is a bit pricey, but Sepe cited the rare availability of apple saplings in the country.
The family enterprise that he founded is called the Kapatagan Apple Orchard, Rare Fruit Farm and Nurseries Diversified Farm.
His achievement was recognized in December 2020 when the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Training Institute recognized his venture as an apple growing learning site, the first in Mindanao so far, and perhaps in the rest of the country.
Also, the Davao del Sur tourism office has included the Kapatagan Apple Orchard as part of the province’s tourism circuit, helping promote Sepe’s apple farm.
Sepe attributed his successful apple farming to the acclimatization of the varieties he propagated, including Fuji apple, to the weather condition in highland Barangay Kapatagan, which is part of the Mt. Apo Natural Park, a UNESCO-declared ASEAN Heritage Park.
In other countries, he said that apples need 7 to 12 degree Celsius to survive.
For Kapatagan, it has an average temperature between 18 to 26 degree Celsius, with a recorded low of 16 degree Celsius, he said, noting the importance of acclimatizing the crop for it to survive and become productive.
From his first successful apple tree, he grafts from it those grown from seeds bought from fresh imported apples flooding the local markets.
To date, Sepe said they have planted 500 apple trees in about three hectares of scattered lands in the village, intercropped with vegetables and other fruit-bearing trees such as durian, mulberry, langka (jackfruit), persimmon and blue berry, among others.
The apple trees are in different stages of cultivation, with many of them already bearing fruits, he added.
“I was able to graduate from college because of my apple venture,” he told this reporter.
So far, the bulk of his income comes from the apple saplings and not from the fruits that the venture produces. He managed to expand to three hectares, from just their 500-square meter property, from the proceeds also of the apple plantlets many would buy to try if this too will grow in their property.
Sepe said that a grafted apple plant can bear fruits between three to five years, and can live for at least 100 years if properly nursed.
Looking back, he shook his head, stating: “I’m glad I did not succumb to other people’s crab mentality. Instead of encouraging you, they pulled you down. There’s a lot of negativity that I hurdled.”
“But I’ve proven them wrong. Karon gusto nakog mahimo ang Kapatagan known sa (Now I want Kapatagan to be known in) apple farming,” he added. (Bong S. Sarmiento / MindaNews)
