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Beginning of Goducate model farm, Laguna Philippines

A few days ago, our team of workers struck good cool water when we dug a 30 meter deep well in our model farm in Laguna, Philippines (2 hours south of Manila airport).

Yesterday, the first load of building materials were delivered to build the little farm house. There is an urgency to get things going before the rainy season starts and hinders construction.

A kind donor has donated a vehicle for transportation of farm goods. And another donor has donated funds for a shredder to shred the decaying vegetation needed for the production of organic fertilizer (by our hard-working earthworms – through the process of vermi-composting.)

We hope to have the farm ready to produce vegetables for our Goducate workers’ families soon. More importantly, Goducate staff will be teaching the poor in the communities where we serve to produce vegetables for their families. Excess fertilizer and farm produce will be sold.The funds from these will help to fund Goducate work in Laguna.

Goducate believes that scientific, small-scale, sustainable farming will be a useful means to help poor Asians help themselves.

Therefore this little farm is a simple but vital link in our plan to help the poor to help themselves.

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Goducate Training Center must be self-supporting

Several people have asked why we had planned to have nice dormitories and facilities at our Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Philippines. They rightly wondered why we wanted to “spoil” our Goducate trainees – who were being trained to work in poor communities. Couldn’t they just sleep on the floor in the Multi-Purpose Hall?

It is likely that the first few batches of trainees will indeed sleep on the floor in the Multi-Purpose Hall, until funds are available to build additional facilities.

However, we are hoping eventually to build proper dormitories and recreational facilities so that the Center can be self-supporting. A core philosophy of Goducate is to help Asians help themselves. Therefore, one of the core skills that our trainees will learn at the Center is to learn how to be self-supporting. It is our hope that when they are sent to poor communities, they will creatively impart this core-vaue of self-support to their communities.

There are several ways that we hope will make the Center self-supporting. A major way is to produce their own food. Trainees will be taught scientific, small-scale food production that can be transferred to most Asian poor rural communities. A good part of the acreage of the camp and a large part of the initial funding is for soil preparation and irrigation. We have several top quality agriculturalists serving as Goducate volunteers at the Center who will help us to achieve this.

Another major way of raising funds is to rent out the Center to corporations for their training functions and to individuals seeking recreational facilities. There is a large potential market for a well run, recreational facility in Iloilo. Besides raising funds for the running of the camp, trainees will also be able to learn many useful skills, eg. management, leadership, planning, creativity. For the Center to be a recreational center, it will need, as funds are available, to have nice facilities, eg. decent accommodation, interesting recreational facilities.

Since funds are limited, we will focus on the agricultural aspect first. After all, the trainees need to eat and agricultural skills are needed in most of the communities that we serve. Scientific, sustainable, small-scale agriculture will be the best way to help Asians help themselves.

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Water source for Goducate model farm in Laguna Philippines

Last week, our Goducate workers and Goducate volunteers finished installing a hand-pump water system for our model-farm in Laguna, Philippines. (For those city-dwellers who get water from a tap and have never used a hand-pump to get water, a hand-pump water system is one which has a lever that needs to be pumped up and down to get the water to flow. You get a free work-out while getting your water!)

The part of Laguna where our model-farm is situated is famous for its sulphurous hot-water spa-resorts. Our workers were joking that it would be good if we drilled into a hot-water source so that they could enjoy the spa-life of the rich and leisured! However, hot, sulphurous water would be disastrous for our worms (which produce our organic fertilizer) and for the crops which we hope to raise on the farm!

Since our farm is within 10 Km from Mount Makiling where there is a large Geothermal Power Plant our chances of drilling into a hot water source was very high. Most of our neighbours had hot sulphurous water from their hand-pump water systems and had to spend much time and effort to cool their water before using it for their crops or cattle.

As almost all well-drillings over 10 meters resulted in hot water, we were thankful that our drilling to 30 meters produced cool water!!
We now have a good source of water that can be used for our farm and can also be shared with our neighbours.

We are looking forward to the day when beautiful crops of leafy vegetables, brinjals, ladies fingers (okra), long beans, bitter gourds, water-melons will be produced on that farm – all fertilized by the abundant source of organic fertilizers that our worms (African night crawlers) produce.

We are looking to the day that our workers will be self-sufficient in producing food for their families and more importantly setting the example to others in the community that it is possible to use nature’s abundance (plus a little technology and diligence) to produce food for their families.

This is one of Goducate’s ways of helping poor Asians help themselves in this typhoon-prone area of the Philippines.

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