mortiz085

Refocusing Agriculture: Excerpt from my Convocation Speech at the 45th Founding Anniversary of Visayas State University (VSU)-Alangalang Campus, Leyte, Philippines on 09 Sept 2016. By V.B. Asio Your theme “Agrivolution: refocusing farming for food and nutrition security” is very timely and very relevant. When I was an agriculture student in ViSCA in 1980, the agriculture battle cry was: we need to increase crop yield by increasing the yield per unit area and by cultivating new lands because of rapidly increasing population . Population of the country at the time was only 48 million. The hot research topic was farming system, which slowly became cropping system, then sustainable agriculture or ecological farming, and now organic agriculture. If you examine these farming strategies, they are closely related. But the last, which is organic agriculture, has become very narrow in scope and very impractical in many aspects. But where are we now? Now more than 30 years have passed, with a st...

The new Philippine National Standard (PNS) for Organic Fertilizer was published in 2013 by the Bureau of Agriculture and Fisheries Product Standards (BAFPS) of the Department of Agriculture (PNS/BAFPS 40:2013). According to this new PNS, Organic Fertilizer is “any product in solid or liquid form, of plant (except by-products from petroleum industries) or animal origin that has undergone substantial decomposition that can supply available nutrients to plants with a total Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K) of five to seven percent (5-7%). This may be enriched by microbial inoculants and naturally occurring minerals but no chemical or inorganic fertilizer material has been added to the finished product to affect the nutrient content.” Organic Plant Growth Regulator/Promoter is “any compound of organic origin, in liquid or solid form, which in low concentration promotes or modifies physiological process in plants.” Organic Plant Supplement is “any compound of organic origin ...

The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) in the USA, assembled in 1980 a high-powered Task Force composed of 24 scientists (chaired by S.R. Aldrich) with expertise in agricultural economics, agronomy, animal science, dairy science, entomology, food science, horticulture, soil science, veterinary medicine and others to look into the similarities and differences between organic and conventional farming. The Task Force report, which remains very relevant to the current debate surrounding organic and conventional agriculture, was officially published as CAST Report No. 84 "Organic and Conventional Farming Compared" in October 1980. Some of the interesting highlights of the report are: 1. Conventional and organic farming have much in common. They differ principally in the use of modern chemical technology. Conventional farmers use commercial inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, animal feed additives) to increase productivity while organic farmers prefer to use natura...