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IT seems
ironic that an agriculture economy like the Philippines
would need a foreigner to provide a tip or two about
growing vegetables. That exactly was what Johnson Huang
did when he found himself uprooted in his native Taiwan
and moved to a remote baranggay in Zambales seven years
ago.
Today
Huang’s
Green Garden
vegetable farm is rapidly growing, to say the least, and
now he has branched out to other related businesses,
dishing out seeds, cutflowers, fruits, planting
materials and technical know-how.
He is
also engaged in training the local Aetas, students,
nuns, farmers and practically anyone who wanted to learn
what he himself discovered when he went into farming. To
think that Huang is not even a farmer or an
agriculturist.
JOHNSON
HUANG, surrounded by his employees in his store, where
they package some of the vegetables bought from
neighboring farms and sold to supermarkets.
--RECTO
MERCENE
This
Taiwanese success story came to light, courtesy of the
Manila Economic Cooperation Office (Meco), which
invited a group of local and foreign journalists to
tract the progress of successful Taiwanese entrepreneurs
in the Philippines.
Ma.
Isabel Oirola Golamco, Meco director and chief finance
officer, had lined up five Taiwanese enterprises to
visit, such as those engaged in semiconductors,
electronics and garments, which are mostly
capital-intensive. It was Huang’s garden that caught
one’s eyes because of his familiar and simple approach
to entrepreneurship.
The
Huang’s family back in
Taiwan
is engaged in manufacturing display racks, cabinet
showcase, tables, gondolas, shoe racks, CD/video racks,
brackets, sales wagon, shelving system and anything that
has to do with showing off a given product inside malls
or department stores and export them all over the world.
Brothers
Stinnes and Johnson Huang came over to the Subic Bay
Metropolitan area in 1994 to relocate part of their
business.
Stinnes,
the elder, eventually established the T&H Shopfitters,
which now supplies SM and Robinsons and scores of
boutiques with their display racks. The company also
exports its products to
Europe,
Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New York, Los Angeles,
Denmark, Florida and the Middle East.
Having
discovered cheap lands in the outlying province where
Johnson Huang, 41, eventually established his garden,
Stinnes put up a factory about a mile away from his
brother’s business and now employs 400 Filipinos in a
30,000 square meters of production space.
He is
one of the first businessmen who ventured out of Subic
to start a business, a move that the Subic Bay
Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) hoped would be followed by
other entrepreneurs who are hampered by concern for
safety and security.
Subic
has a very limited area and soon would need to spread
outside of its boundaries to absorb the local workers,
according to SBMA administrator Armand Arreza.
In 1994
the younger Huang, went out of Subic to view the
countryside and wondered why so many open spaces lay
idle. In Taiwan an economic giant about the size of
Luzon, every square inch of tillable lands is put to
use. In agriculture zones, rice, tea, vegetables and
fruits abound and many open spaces are dug up to give
way to impounding basins to collect rainwater in
preparation for the summer drought.
Intrigued by the challenge of making the open
countryside productive, Huang leased a one-hectare lot
in barangay Balaybay in Castillejos town in Zambales, a
very poor village about an hour drive north of Subic.
There he
built a greenhouse for his plants. He started with
vegetables familiar to him, such as Taiwan pechay, kale;
a type of broccoli where only the leaves are used;
spinach; kangkong (swamp cabbage), but in Huang’s case,
planted on the ground; kutchay; white ampalaya; seedless
eggplant; okra; tomato, bottle gourd. Eventually, he
added more types and now count about 20 kinds of leafy
and fruiting veggies.
“One
day, after a night of roaring winds, I woke up and went
to the window and found out that my greenhouses had
flown away,” Huang said of his most unforgettable
experience, having first tasted the strength of a local
typhoon.
He soon
imported his materials from Taiwan, finding them strong
enough to resist high winds and ultraviolet rays. He
said imported plastic lasts from five to seven years, as
against the locally produce duration of one year.
But the
success that Huang envisioned did not materialize.
Nobody is familiar with the food that he grows and they
refused to buy them. At the same time, the area is not
big enough to absorb his production, so he had trouble
disposing five kilograms of daily harvest of kangkong.
What
Huang did next is a marketing strategy that he did not
learn from books; he distributes the produce free to his
neighbors, asking them to taste his vegetables for as
long as they want them.
Next, he
visited local outlets to find out if they would buy his
products. To his surprise, he saw that veggies are not
wrapped but displayed willy-nilly, subject to raids of
rats and vermin, which easily shorten their shelf life.
The
outlets tried his produce and he now counts them as his
permanent clients, such as Royal Traders, Puregold,
Tropical Palace, Shopwise and 7-Eleven, among a few that
extends as far as the SM Southmall in Las Piñas.
Today
Huang’s
Green Garden
is worth P10 million, situated on 11 hectares of land he leases. He could go on expanding to the surrounding
countryside, but found that he could make money by
simply buying and reselling other’s farms products
while, at the same time, engaged in spreading the gospel
of his own success.
Today
truckloads of vegetables are delivered to him daily,
which he wrapped and distributes to outlets in Valenzula,
Bulacan, San Juan, Antipolo City, Taytay, Parañaque and
Las Piñas.
Huang
got the idea of a greenhouse to grow year-round
vegetable after he discovered that Balaybay’s rainfall
exceeds those of other more benign areas like Tagaytay
or Laguna.
However,
he said it’s too late for him to relocate and was happy
in Balaybay, where he employs about 70 workers.
Each
part-time worker receives a wage of P120 to P150 a day,
while supervisors are given P180 to P250 daily wage.
Regular staffers are paid P160 to P180, with SSS
contributions.
Nowadays, his words of advice are sought on how to
construct greenhouses, which he said cost P80,000 for a
110-square-meter area. Local GI pipes are used for the
trusses.
Huang
started with about a million pesos in capital, which he
got back soon to capitalize his expansion. “At first,
after working in the gardens, I left and sleep in Subic,”
he said, an attitude that many foreigners practice,
knowing the reported notoriety of bandits who roam the
countryside.
However,
as he stayed longer in the area, he found that each
home’s doors and windows remain open all the time, the
residents not fearing the alleged bandits. Since then,
Huang build his own home within the garden compound and
spend most of his time working there, going home to
visit his family in Taipei only once a year, during the
Chinese New Year.
The
brothers Huang are hooked by the neighbors’ hospitality
and friendliness, who are themselves so enamored of the
foreigners’ approachability that they offered the
younger Huang to be their barangay captain.
Johnson,
who has since shed his white skin and is now as dark as
the natives, refused, knowing how busy he is just
managing his own enterprise.
His
advice to aspiring veggie entrepreneur is to start small
while feeling their way about market demands.
After
seven years,
Green Garden’s
output is 1,000 to 1,200 kilograms daily of fruits and vegetables and the demand keeps growing, especially
from newly established malls and supermarkets. He
encouraged competition among his workers, making a tally
of which team produced the most vegetables, which the
other team would try to outdo.
“Many
big Taiwanese businessmen came here before me and went
into the vegetable business but they lost, not knowing
where to find outlets for their produce,” Huang said. |
