DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 31 January) – Do more intercropping and multiple cropping strategies to produce more crops even with a limited land area, an official at the Department of Agriculture-Region 11 (DA-11) urged local farmers.
Multiple cropping is a farming practice of growing more than one crop in the same area during a certain period of time.
Intercropping, on the other hand, is the practice of growing multiple crops simultaneously in the same area.
“If [farmers] go with innovation… We can go with intercropping, multicropping, basically a farming system that could be amenable, we need to [gauge] potential of the land which farmers use,” Zabdiel Zacarias, DA-11 research and regulations regional executive director, said during a press conference at SM Lanang Premier, Friday morning.
The call was in response to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) press release Thursday that the number of farms in Davao Region increased from 338,334 in 2012 to 484,125 in 2022 but the farm area has decreased from 575,559 hectares in 2012 to 496,770 hectares in 2022.
PSA added the average farm area per farmer also decreased, from 1.7 hectares in 2012 to 1.03 hectares in 2022.
“Logically, less area means less yield. But we need our farmers to understand that multicropping is more effective. It’s not on how large or small the farmland is, it’s on how we utilize the land for more productivity,” Zacarias said when asked for comments on the latest PSA release.
Meanwhile, Cherilyn Casuga, Davao City Chamber of Commerce and Industry vice-president for industry, said farmers must upskill to adapt to these changes.
Casuga, who owns a farm and a farming school, said that aside from using various planting and harvesting techniques, farmers must also acquire more new skills.
These include selling, data management, using social media, determining means of distribution, and organizing logistics, to make their farms productive.
“There is value, there is pankabuhayan nga pwede (there is a livelihood potential)… definitely, we need to upskill, we need to do research, we need to try it ourselves and not be pessimistic,” Casuga said.
PSA-11 stated that out of 575,559 hectares of farmlands in Davao Region, 70.2 percent were used mainly for growing permanent crops, or crops which were not replaced or replanted with other crops after harvest, while 11.54 percent were used mainly for growing temporary crops. (Ian Carl Espinosa/MindaNews)
