Goducate … Go And Educate!

About 15 kilometers away from the Goducate Training Center (GTC) in San Miguel, Iloilo, is a place called “seven cities”, a monicker for seven villages in the highlands of Alimodian, Iloilo.  The area used to be a hotbed of insurgency, but thanks to farmers like Antonio, who has a passion to help his own people, his village has attained considerable peace and order.

Antonio visited GTC a year ago and was impressed by the vegetable production models he saw.  It sparked his interest in growing high-value vegetables in his own village, where the temperatures often dips to as low as 18 degrees Celsius at night. After visiting his small farm, I advised him to concentrate on organic strawberry production since he has practically no competitors in the whole of Western Visayas.  Strawberries requires warm daytime temperatures and cool nights to induce flowering, and his village has just the right conditions.

Starting with only 5 tissue-cultured plantlets that Goducate provided, Antonio was able to produce sufficient runners for container gardening and for field production.   He uses plant concoctions—made from fermented fruit and fermented plant juices—as fertilizer, fungicide, and insecticide to ensure organic produce, a technology he learned from Goducate.

Antonio is the first to grow strawberries in Iloilo, Philippines.  As token of his appreciation to Goducate for the technical assistance he received, Antonio has offered GTC to be the exclusive outlet for his strawberry harvests.  Once his plant nursery has enough propagated runners, he plans to help other local farmers to engage in strawberry production as a means of livelihood or as a means of supplementary income.