By Leonardo Perante II
SAN MATEO, Isabela—While farmers in El Niño-stricken provinces in the country are in a dilemma on how to confront the severe dehydration of rice farms in their respective areas, farmers in this agricultural town are cheering on how they beat the summer heat as they harvest their munggo crops planted during the dry weather barely two moths after harvesting their rice crops.
“Unlike rice, munggo does not need flooded paddies to survive so it grows wild,” said incumbent San Mateo Vice Mayor Roberto Agcaoili, who has been a three-term mayor of the town.
Locally called balatong, munggo is a drought-tolerant crop. The root system of this legume also restores the fertility of the soil as it is filled with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
What has been dubbed as “black gold (because of its black matured pods), munggo has won the prestigious Galing Pook Award. Of all winners, it has sustained productivity and lucrative income-earner of the year.
An agro-ecological destination, the town has more than 7,000 hectares of farms planted to munggo during the dry season.
Next to rice, the protein-rich mung bean or munggo stays as a major cash crop of this town. For a number of reasons, the leguminous crop has been institutionalized as a primary alternative to rice in terms of income generation and climatic adaptability.
“We can just imagine the thousands of hectares planted to rice during the regular cropping season that would automatically be converted into verdantly robust mung-bean plantations during summer months, when most parts of the country are in a dry spell. We can see no gaps of productivity since, after harvesting rice, the first priming for mung-bean picking would follow in just 60 days after planting,” said the vice mayor, who is a farmer himself.
An average production of 800 kilos to 1,000 kilos of munggo per hectare at the prevailing price of P65 per kilo translates into incomes ranging from P52,000 to P65,000 per hectare. This means P455 million in additional income for local farmers during summer.
While the tiny first-class town has been declared officially as “The Mung Bean Capital of the Philippines” by Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala, it has, however, excelled in other agricultural feats, like the Agri-Pinoy Rice Achievers Award—won for the third time in a row by the municipality including its rice technicians.
Being home to the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, the Agricultural Training Institute, the Bureau of Plant Industry and PhilRice is seen as an advantage that has resulted to a number of Gawad Saka Awards the town reaped.
With this edge, the municipality has transformed from merely a rice and mung-bean plantation into a high-tech seed-growing state, an added value that many local farmers have unwittingly obtained in terms of multiplied income because demands for planting materials have escalated from farmers of nearby towns and provinces who want to replicate the agricultural practice.
Municipal Agricultural Officer Emiliano Camba said that many farmers in town have successfully engaged in off-season cropping of vegetables usually grown in semi-temperate terrains of the Cordilleras and in the uplands of Nueva Vizcaya.
“Our farmers here have learned how to maximize the productivity of their farm lots that they have mastered the cultivation of vegetables that never before survived the warm climate of the province,” Camba said.
Farmers in Barangay Sinamar Norte are into production of watermelons and “sweet pearl” glutinous corns. The more enterprising ones would match their mungbean crops with leafy ampalaya that usually go together in an Ilocano recipe. Truckloads of the ampalaya tops are shipped out daily.
Also in the same barangay, a Lourdes Agpaoa pioneered what is today a blooming industry in the village. Forty households who are practically Agpaoa’s younger relatives are now engaged in the cut-flower industry raising mums in their respective backyards. What started as a women’s enterprise became the men’s main business as the industry grew into commercial scale.
To add more to an already high-value crop, the local government, through the Municipal Agriculture Office, has introduced a number of processed products derived from munggo that range from mungbean noodles, mooncakes, flavored munggo chips to wine and more.
“The munggo-processing center in Barangay San Marcos has produced a number of wonderful nutritious food products dominated by Canton-type mungbean noodles and flavored munggo chips, but a sotanghon factory is now our target to upgrade and give more value to our mungbean harvests,” Agcaoili said.
Many farmers foresee that once a sotanghon-processing center becomes available in town, marketing their harvests would no longer be a problem and it would entice even the neighboring towns to engage in large-scale mung-bean production.
“It is precisely of these reasons that we are eyeing to avail ourselves financial assistance from the Department of Agriculture [DA] through the Philippine Rural Development Project [PRDP],” Agcaoili said.
Through the PRDP, the DA, World Bank and local government units work hand-in-hand in helping farmers increase their incomes and have more job opportunities.
Image credits: Leonardo Perante II