Thursday, April 19, 2012

Learn More About Our Trees



Bloom Of The Week
By NORBY BAUTISTA

This driveway leading to a hostel in Peñablanca, Cagayan Valley is lined with beautiful native trees that provide shade for pedestrians. (Photo by NOEL B. PABALATE)
This driveway leading to a hostel in Peñablanca, Cagayan Valley is lined with beautiful native trees that provide shade for pedestrians. (Photo by NOEL B. PABALATE)
MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos are being encouraged to appreciate the importance of our Philippine native trees. Our trees thrive well in the Philippine setting and they give the natural landscape that distinctive Filipino look.  Most of our trees were introduced from other countries. These include the Acacia, Mahogany, African Tulip, Sampaloc, Calachuchi and most of our fruit trees.  Only a few like the Narra and Talisay are native trees.
Not many people can identify some truly native trees and what they can be used for. Learning from old folks has been instrumental in familiarizing us with some of them.  We have shade trees like the Agoho, Antipolo, Balitbitan and Banuyo.  Some trees have medicinal properties like the Alagau, Banaba, Bani and Lagundi.  The important timber tree species includes Narra, Apitong, Bagras, Bagtikan, Malapapaya, Bangkal, Batino, Dita, Dao and Molave.  We also have trees that produce colorful sprays of flowers such as Narra, Anilaw, Mangkono, Aunasin, Bagawak Morado, Balai Lamok, Banaba, Kamuning and Mali-Mali.  For fruits and nuts, we have Anubing, Mangga (Kalabaw and Pahutan), Talisay, Mabolo or Kamagong, Katmon, Bignay, Bitungol, Kalumpit, Lipote and Marang.  We also have vegetable trees like Aunasin, Bago and Kamansi.
Native trees are icons of the beauty and the bounty of our natural heritage.  The Philippines boasts of about 3,600 identified native trees of which 67 percent are endemic, meaning they are found only in our archipelago.
There is a need for them to be conserved and protected. Most of the native trees in our forests are fast disappearing as most of them are used for timber and paper production.  Furthermore, they are being replaced by exotic invasive tree species like the popular Mahogany, which is actually not good for our wildlife. Trees clean our air, fertilize our soil, absorb floods and provide a habitat for birds, butterflies and other tree dwelling animals. The non-use of our trees endangers their existence as they can end up as weeds. We should learn more about what they can for us so that the public will at least be aware of their value and make an effort to preserve them.
Our native trees come in different sizes, shapes,and shades of green in combination with other hues of other colors. Leaves may range from large to tiny, round to elongated, thick to paper-thin, waxy to rough. Trunks also have many shapes and texture from straight to twisting to gnarled, singular or branched, smooth or covered with rough bark. Roots may grow vertically down and deep, or buttressed and shallow. The combinations are endless and they can suit any type of urban landscaping requirement.
A team of environmentally conscious native tree-advocates is publishing a colorful and informative book on native trees. Entitled “Philippine Native Trees 101… Up Close and Personal,” it is being published by Green Convergence for Safe Food, Healthy Environment and Sustainable Economy (GC).  The project team is composed of Dr. Angelina P. Galang, Sylvia Mesina, Marie Marciano, Imelda Sarmiento and Arceli Tungol, who served as the book’s chief photographer.
I’m very sure that the book will benefit both garden aficionados and plant hobbyists alike, as it’s supposed to be an eye opener on the value of our native trees.  We are hoping to see the book by the end of May this year.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Beekeeping is alternate livelihood for La Union’s tobacco farmers



By: 


share17 14
BACNOTAN, La Union—For this tobacco-producing province, promoting a healthier image does not stop at just banning smoking in casinos and public areas.
It goes as far as adopting a healthier lifestyle and finding an alternative livelihood in honey production.
According to provincial agriculturist Imelda Sannadan, beekeeping has always been a backyard industry in La Union but it has not really been taken advantage of.
This is because the tobacco industry had provided a good livelihood for the farmers until the global campaign against smoking reduced demand for tobacco leaves.
To give farmers an alternative livelihood, Sannadan says the La Union government started promoting apiculture development in 2000, when Republic Act 9151 was passed.
The law created the National Apiculture Research Training and Development Institute (Nartdi) at the Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University here.
The La Union Honeybee Center started full operations in September last year to make the province the “honeybee capital of the north.”
“The center serves as a facility for processing raw honey, as well as an equipment store for those who want to start beekeeping,” says Vissia Jadraque, honey equipment operator at the center.

BEE Pollen (top) and Honey and proplis soap products on display. Photo by Marla Viray, Inquirer Northern Luzon
Beekeepers can sell their raw honey for P250 to P270 a kilogram, provided it passes the standard moisture content.
From only 10 beekeepers in 2000, there are now 42 beekeepers, all trained by Nartdi, who comprise the La Union Beekeepers Development Cooperative (Lubdco).
About 70 families, however, engage in private backyard beekeeping in the province, and more farmers are getting interested, says Sanaddan.
However, the honeybee center does not just allow any person to buy equipment and start beekeeping on his own. Training is a requirement before one buys equipment for backyard beekeeping.
“They should first be trained by Nartdi because beekeeping and hive management is not as simple as it looks,” says David de Castro, apiculturist and research assistant of Nartdi.
De Castro says two five-frame nucleus starter hives, costing at least P6,000 each, are needed to start beekeeping. When their population increases and re-hiving is needed, the bees need to be transferred to an eight-frame standard hive.
He says a comb, or one back-to-back frame, contains at least 2,000 bees, producing a minimum of 2.5 kg of honey. There are about 170 starter and standard hives in Nartdi’s apiary in front of the honeybee center.
Records from the Department of Agriculture show that 1,190.571 kg of raw honey were bought from members of Lubdco in February and in first two weeks of March.

Photo by Marla Viray, Inquirer Northern Luzon
The raw honey is processed into bottled pure honey, which is packaged into 300-gram bottles and sold for P130 each, and 10-ml packs sold for P10 each.
Honey byproducts produced in the center include honey vinegar, massage oil, all-purpose balm, honey and propolis (substance collected by bees from leaf buds and tree barks) soap and bee pollen.
Ferdinand Geslani, DA provincial nursery laborer, says the Canadian Executive Service Organization provided technical knowledge and assistance to the center in producing the honey byproducts.
Honey is the One Town One Product (Otop) of La Union. The province’s apiculture program has been cited by the government as the Luzon Island Best Otop Implementor.

BluGre to bring Davao’s durian coffee to the world



By: 



share97 81

Photo by Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao
The coffee shop that brought the coffee lifestyle to Davao more than a decade ago is now eyeing to bring Davao City to the world.
BluGre Café, whose name has become synonymous with Davao City for concocting the coffee blend mixed with the pulp of Davao’s icon fruit durian, is finally setting its eyes not only on major cities in the country but also in major cities in Asia, Canada and the US.
“Twenty for 2012,” says BluGre coffee owner Gatchie Gatchalian, referring to the 20 stores they are set to open for the year 2012.
Gatchalian says they have inked an agreement with a number of partners to open branches, targeting durian-eating countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand; and cities with large concentration of Filipinos, including Las Vegas in the US, Toronto in Canada and Adelaide, Australia.
“We are going to make our presence felt in these places because these are cities and countries where our partners are based,” he says.
He remembers how he, himself, a coffee lover, and wife Larchie, first opened its Davao branch in 1998 as a spinoff of the fashion brand they are selling. But even from the beginning, Gatchalian says he already recognized the need to make his brand stand out by making a difference in the highly-competitive market.
“Even before we opened, I already made sure, that we should have something different to offer, something that really speaks about Davao,” he says. “That’s how we started experimenting with durian coffee.”
Gatchie says not all people come to like the durian fruit the first time they taste it, but coffee tends to drown out its pungent taste and masks its strong and disagreeable smell, that’s why the durian coffee could be a good introduction to the actual fruit.
“Offering them durian coffee could be the first step in introducing the fruit to non-durian eaters,” says Gatchie, who grew up in Manila and did not take to the fruit easily the first time he tasted it.

OWNER Gatchie Gatchalian. Photo by Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao
“Like I did, not all people would come to like the fruit immediately,” he says. “But if you do it in the coffee, the coffee covers its strong and disagreeable smell, that’s the first step,” he says, “Soon afterwards, they can eat the durian fruit, itself.”
When BluGre opened its first branch at the LandCo building in 1998, the coffee culture has not yet swept Davao. But when young urban professionals and students discovered the pleasure of hanging around the cozy, well-designed interiors, having long intimate conversations or simply relaxing in its quiet ambiance, word got around, giving birth to the coffee lifestyle of the Davaoeños. This triggered the sprouting of more coffee shops all over Davao, so that, in one of the press briefing in the late 90s, night bars had complained of thinning crowds as more people hang around cafes at night.
BluGre has not only become popular among the locales but also among travelers and visitors.
“When you’re from Manila, you will likely look for something different when you      arrive in Davao, something you have not tasted before, and that’s why they continue to come to BluGre,” he says.
He admits, too, that sales was temporarily affected by the coming in of Starbucks in Davao in May last year but sales perked up again as visitors continue to search for the coffee shop that “truly reflects” the tastes of Davao.
Aside from the durian coffee, BluGre also offers the usual fare of latte and mocha; and a number of bestselling cakes and pastries. BluGre sources most of its Philippine coffee beans from the Mountain Province; so, to ensure product quality in all of the BluGre outlets, they have organized a quality control team to maintain and ensure the consistency of their product, Gatchie says.
“That we brought the coffee culture to Davao, that is our claim to fame, so the whole country wrote about it. For a while BluGre has become Davaoeños’ official drink,” he says.
He considers his brand positioning so successful that even their durian coffee was being copied by newcomers. “But what could be a greater flattery?” he asks.
“In Davao, they say there are already 280 coffee shops, matira ang matibay (only the fittest will survive),” Gatchie say.
“But we alone can claim to have started the coffee culture in Davao since 1998 and we’ll make sure we will continue that,” he says. “We will continue to capitalize on durian coffee, targeting durian eating countries abroad, which include Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand.”
“We will also be targeting Davaoeños abroad,” he says.
Gatchie says he is thankful that Davao has been treating BluGre as their own brand but they had to set their eyes beyond the country if they build on what they have done.
“We plan to go where there is a concentration of Filipinos,” he says. “Our slogan is bring Davao to the world.”

Pulling Bicol up from poverty with coco fiber ropes



The story of Dr. Justino Arboleda

By: 


share358 328

DR. ARBOLEDA: He pulled Bicol up with coco fiber rope.
In the early 90s, when the then dean of Bicol University’s College of Agriculture, Dr. Justino Arboleda, first heard of a report naming Bicol as the second poorest province in the Philippines, he was incredulous. “I could not believe it! How could Bicol be the second poorest province?” he asked. “We are so rich in coconut trees, the tree of life itself.”
He then continued, “So we conducted our own investigation in the university and to our dismay, we found that the report was correct.” Thus started Dr. Arboleda’s crusade to discover what had caused Bicol’s poverty and, more importantly, how to help alleviate it.
The quest eventually led him to leave his comfortable spot in the academe. He went straight to where these poor people were—the coconut farmers—to be able to give them an alternative means of livelihood by starting his own coconut husk processing company, now known as Coco Technologies Corporation (Cocotech).
“In school, we always hear that the coconut tree is the tree of life, that every part of the tree is useful,” he explains. “But in real life, we do not use every part of the tree. The coconut husk, for instance, is thrown away more than 99 percent of the time. It is considered farm waste—but when you think about it, there are actually so many things you could do with the coconut husk!”
As an agricultural engineering graduate from the Tokyo University, with a master’s and a doctorate degree to boot, Dr. Arboleda certainly knew what he was talking about. All the know-how, he already had. There was just one crucial thing that kept him from turning coco fiber (from coconut husk) into a profitable business venture: funding.
“At that time, nobody believed you could make money from coco fiber,” he says. “Wherever we went, they laughed at us. One banker that we tried to borrow from even scolded me. He says, ‘You in the academe are so full of researches, but you are unwilling to invest your own money into them.’”
With this challenge thrown in his face, Dr. Arboleda decided to do exactly what that banker said he would not do. He took his family’s savings, borrowed what he could from his siblings, and with the P250,000 that he was able to pool, plus the 5-by-10-meter piece of land his in-laws lent him, he started his tiny coco husk processing factory.
Incidentally, for him to be able to focus on the business, Dr. Arboleda also resigned from his dean position in Bicol University. “I knew I would need to be away most of the time to market our products, and I did not want people to say that I continued to receive a salary even when I was not present at the university.”
With his safety net of a fixed income gone, Dr. Arboleda took on consultancy work to support his family’s needs as his business strove to get off the ground. This consultancy sent him to overseas conferences. When it sent him to Germany less than a year after the business started, he took advantage of the opportunity to market his coco fiber products.
He educated his audience on coco fiber’s superior ability to absorb moisture, pressure, sound, and odors. He explained that coco fiber has natural antifungal and antibacterial properties. It is resistant to insects and mold. It could be used to insulate buildings from heat, cold, and sound. Coco fiber doormats ensured that all dirt and water from the streets stayed outside the shiny buildings’ doors. Coco fiber was good for car seat cushions, cat scratching poles, planting materials, even fertilizer. To top it all off, it was affordable, durable, and completely biodegradable.

INSTALLING coconut fiber at Estero De Paco
The Europeans knew a good thing when they saw it. Suddenly, Dr. Arboleda had a huge export market. When he came home, he had to ask his in-laws if he could expand his factory to cover the whole farm. They agreed on a lease price, and the factory grew.
For several years after that, Dr. Arboleda was able to give livelihood to around a thousand households in Bicol. The people who spun his coco fiber ropes, which formed the base of many of his products, earned more money than they ever earned from just farming. Even the children were allowed to help, but only under Dr. Arboleda’s condition that they stayed in school. If the kids dropped out of school, the family was removed from the list of contractors. The families, of course, kept their kids in school. It all worked as it was supposed to.
Then disaster struck. One day, while visitors were at the factory, somebody accidentally dropped a lighted cigarette on a pile of coconut husks. “We are normally very strict against smoking near the factory, but visitors can be a bit hard to monitor,” Dr. Arboleda said. A raging fire resulted, and just like that, the factory was burned to the ground. Fortunately, they were insured, but the damages were not fully covered. The company had to shoulder the rest.
They were able to rebuild. But as luck would have it, just as they were starting to get on their feet again, that once-in-a-lifetime typhoon Reming struck. It was a typhoon Bicol would never forget, for the whole province was devastated.
As for Cocotech, their newly rebuilt factory was flattened. To make matters even worse, the coconut trees in the province were all felled, and there were no coconuts that could be sourced from Bicol for two whole years.
“At that time, I really wanted to give up,” Dr. Arboleda recalls. “But I could not abandon my employees.” And so little by little, they started again. For a time, they outsourced their raw materials from other provinces. It took six years for them to again rebuild their factory—but this time, they made sure the structure was typhoon-proof.
Recently, Dr. Arboleda was able to present his products and his work to President Noynoy Aquino. He showed the president how his erosion-controlling coco nets would allow the government to create longer-lasting ripraps at a fraction of the cost they would incur if they used concrete instead.
The coco nets helped plants grow on the riprap, their roots held the soil tightly, and they prevented landslide not only because the plant roots took in the water but also because the coco fiber nets were highly absorbent.
In fact, Dr. Arboleda’s technology had already been used in earlier years to prevent landslide in the Tagaytay Highlands. His coco nets were also used in the ripraps along the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expresway (SCTEx). Now, under President Aquino’s directive, they will be used in the Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway (TPLEx).
With a project of this magnitude, Dr. Arboleda once again faced his biggest headache: funding. “Our clients take 60 to 90 days to pay us,” he explains, “but our workers need to be paid on the spot.”
Fortunately, this time, Dr. Arboleda found an ally. Steering away from all the institutions that had rejected him in the past, he says, “We presented our case to Plantersbank, and they listened. They were very supportive, and they loaned us the money we needed to pay our workers so that this project could be done.
“I only wish I had met them earlier,” he laughs.
Today, Coco Technologies Corporation has a 7,000 square meter factory in Bicol, plus a separate warehouse in Quezon City. They are exporting products to Europe, Japan, and Canada. They are giving livelihood to around 2,000 households in Bicol.
In addition, they are offering free training to everyone who wants to follow in their footsteps.
“The market out there is huge, there’s plenty for all,” says the Bicolano hero. Indeed, there is life in the coconut tree. But it took one Dr. Arboleda to bring that life to Bicol’s poor.