This extra value for business surfaced in a technology forum held during the Upscaling RED (rural enterprise development) Project Farmers? Field/Market Day and Second Villaba Goat Festival on June 10 in Villaba, Leyte.

Coinciding with the centennial celebration of the town?s founding, the festival began with a parade of goats tied with yellow ribbons or wearing colorful attire and birthday suits, accompanied by their owners or caretakers, through the main streets.

Big goats in sheds or pens were displayed in front of the AV gymnasium, while goat meat or chevron dishes, such as caldereta, longganisa (native sausage) and nuggets, and goat?s milk products were showcased at the food court inside.

Skin care products that use fresh goat?s milk, such as beauty soaps, body lotion, body scrub and body wash, were also shown. These are now being sold commercially.

Odor-free

Experts explain that goats are clean animals and that only the males exude a smelly odor during the breeding season to attract the females.

Goat?s milk is more digestible than cow?s milk.

?What is important is we can have instant cash in times of emergency,? said farmer Ricardo Pinote, 33, of Barangay Balite who takes care of 13 goats that he and his neighbors own. A goat big enough for slaughtering could fetch as much as P100 per kilo, live weight.

Pinote said his goats had become bigger and sturdier through artificial insemination. During his younger days, he took care of small native goats.

Gemma Ignacio, 45, believed that goat raising was easier than pig raising.

?What is important is to transfer the goats to a shade once or before they are under the heat of the sun, and they must also have a good grazing area,? she said.

When her husband died two years ago in Bulacan, Ignacio returned to Barangay Bugabuga in Villaba. She started a vegetable farm and now raises five goats.

?I attended a goat-raising seminar last year, which lured me to goat raising,? she recalled. Wilson A. Cerbito, regional technical director of the Department of Agriculture, initiated the RED program in Eastern Visayas that encourages farmers to venture into goat raising. He helped organize goat raisers? associations and the holding of the goat festival.

Now on its second year, the event was participated by goat raisers from Tabango, Matag-ob, Jaro, Sta. Fe; and Leyte towns, Ormoc and Tacloban cities in Leyte; and Calbayog City in Samar.

Delegations from the Ilocos, Cagayan Valley and Central Luzon, as well as from the municipal governments in Eastern Visayas, the DA regional office, municipal and provincial agriculture offices, and the Philippine Council for Agriculture, and Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development in Los Baños, Laguna, also came.

RED project

The RED project is implemented only in these regions, according to Leo Cañeda, agriculture regional executive director. Eastern Visayas has the most number of goat raisers mobilized for the project at about 400.

Cañeda said the effort has so far been successful. ?We have reduced the mortality rate (of goats); preweaning interval was reduced; we were able to lower it from nine to seven months; improved (the goats?) nutrition; and through artificial insemination, we increased the reproductive capacity of goats,? he said.

In the past, goat raising was only an extra work activity in the farm, but it is now contributing to about 70 percent of the total household income of farmers-turned-goat raisers, Cañeda said.

?It?s becoming the main event,? he added.