Has anyone heard of ADX, which can be the figurative “opium of the masses” that President Duterte can inject into the lifeblood of small farmers as a sustainable economic adrenaline to jump-start the countryside and help wipe out rural poverty?
No need to weed out this grass? ADX is a sugarcane-like plant of the grass family of South American origins that was considered traditionally to have no value as you cannot extract sugar from it.
Being invasive as it can grow anywhere like a weed without fertilization, soil conditioner or water, it was considered a vegetative pest, but not anymore as scientists have found ways to maximize its use as feedstock for biomass fuel.
VL “Sonny” Domingo, national chairman of the Kapisanan ng Magsasaka, Mangingisda at Manggagawa ng Pilipinas Inc. (Kammmpi), reveals that “this ADX technology forms only part of the package of integrated high-end technologies that we have put together under what we call “Smart Farms” that consolidate small farmers into viable and sustainable farm businesses and thus achieve the benefits of economies of scale.”
Kammmpi Foreign Technical Consultant Alan Hayward showed pictures of ADX reed grass being much taller, stockier and sturdier than sugarcane plants. He said those huge ADX weeds can grow on any marginalized lands, without water or sunshine, and no fertilizers or soil conditioners.
Lazy poor man’s source of power? ADX is actually a good source of energy to widely disperse farmers in the rural areas, where bringing power through transmission and distribution lines are too costly and beyond reach.
Kammmpi’s Ka Sonny said ADX serves as the best fodder for biomass energy for rural electrification owing to the economics of extremely low costs of production.
“Imagine, you only plant almost once, and because of its high ratooning and high growth, you can harvest lazily every four months over the next 20 years,” he added. It appears ADX can also sequester nitrogen from the air and convert it into fertilizer and survive from the little water vapor in the atmosphere and with its sturdy roots reach out deep into the moist earth underground.
Hayward says bio-energy plants, which feed on rice hulls that costs P2.50 per kilo, will now benefit more as current experimental local costs of ADX are much lower at only 50 centavos per kilo. This means that the difference in cost margins can be passed on as additional income for the farmers.
Europe has now 30,000 hectares of ADX for its renewable biomass energy projects, but tropical countries, like Malaysia, show double yields and vegetation as ADX absorbs the high humidity in the air.
ADX for electrigation, pulp paper. And because it is now possible to build many mini- gasifiers to power deep-well water pumps in many arable lands that are rich in aquifers, farmers can now pump out ground water for irrigation. The same water on the rice fields seep back later into the aquifers.
This way, small farmers in marginalized areas can now avail themselves of pumped water for irrigation, without relying on government’s massive irrigation projects that are mostly extensions of big power water dams.
Hayward added it is easier now to produce ADX planting materials on a mass-scale through tissue culture. He has already built five tissue culture laboratories all over the world and is willing to build at least one in the Philippines for Kammmpi’s Smart Farms, which hopefully get government’s and private investors’ attention.
Hayward added that because of its silage or cellulose material, any excess ADX production can also be used to produce pulp for paper, which has been increasing in demand owing to the ban in the use of plastic bags by many local governments.
The rural gasifiers, which will mainly fuel Kammmpi’s “electrigation pumps”, have short payback periods of only three years.
Mechanize for higher productivity. With rural power now available, it is now possible for the Smart Farms to adopt higher mechanization from mini-compact rice mills to various other postharvest facilities that will increase yield recovery.
Ka Sonny said the Philippines lags behind other Asian countries in the adoption of farm mechanization. A few years back, records show that the Philippines has the lowest farm mechanization levels of 0.5 horsepower (HP) per hectare, compared to Thailand’s 0.7 HP per hectare, China’s 3.2 HP per hectare, South Korea’s 4.1 HP per hectare and Japan’s 7.0 HP per hectare.
The SMART Farm model. Essentially, there is more to Smart Farms, which is an acronym for Systematic, Modernized, Appropriate Rural Technologies (Smart), that adopt the modern and big business corporation’s agribusiness systems Approach, but this time involving small farmers as major stakeholders along corporative models of development.
There are other forms of intervention like change of seeds, inputs, the push toward higher value-adding and agro-processing at the farm level, etc.
But the bottom line is for farmers to produce more, process more, market more and earn more to wipe out rural poverty, which mainly breeds the massive rural-to-urban migration of rural folks escaping the clutches of rural misery only to end up shackled in urban poverty and ending up in slums contributing to attendant social urban poor problems, like housing backlog, joblessness, prostitution, criminality, juvenile delinquency and drugs.
In short, the war on drugs must not be limited to police work, but must be a social and economic empowering in the countryside, where two-thirds of those living below the poverty line resides.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com
1 comment