Women farmers plant crops for festivals

Since October, Alice Rivera has been harvesting strawberries from a 500-square meter lot in La Trinidad, Benguet, and her produce has been picking up since January.

This February, she expects better sales because visitors troop to neighboring Baguio City for the Panagbenga (Baguio Flower Festival).

“We expect throngs of visitors [of Baguio] to visit our farm and buy our fresh strawberries,” says Rivera, a 45-year-old widow and mother of a 9-year-old boy.

La Trinidad’s strawberry fields are just 6 kilometers from Baguio.

After Baguio’s monthlong flower festival, Benguet’s capital town of La Trinidad celebrates its strawberry festival in March.

For Rivera and other hundreds of farmers from the valley town, this is the season to be jolly as strawberries have been selling for P80 to P100 a kilogram.

“P80 is already a good price but P100 is of course much better,” says Rivera.

Starting this January up to May, she expects to harvest an average of 20 kg every three days. So with the current price, she expects a gross income of P3,200 to P4,000 a week.

Besides strawberries, Rivera tends another 500-sq m lot planted to lettuce, which she also expects to start harvesting in April, the peak of the summer season when visitors come.

She has been leasing both lettuce and strawberry plots from the government-run Benguet State University.

Strawberry farmers in recent years added a new attraction for visitors who want to experience harvesting strawberries themselves.

“Many love the experience [of harvesting], especially after some of them would discover that the strawberry plant is not a bush or a tree to climb,” says Rivera.

Rivera is happy because on-the-spot harvesting is priced more than twice as much the current retail price. If the current retail price is P100 a kg, those harvested by visitors are priced at P250 a kg.

“Besides the experience, the price includes possible damage to the plants as a result of faulty harvesting,” says Rivera. “And the price includes those strawberries which some visitors couldn’t resist to munch while harvesting.”

Small farmers like Rivera rely on the changing seasons for their livelihood. Starting July, they clean and prepare their farms and plant them in August.

Whatever little savings they have would have been consumed by then especially after paying their children’s school tuition in June. So by now they have to loan some amount to start anew.

Most of them borrow from more wealthy farmers, loan sharks and microfinance institutions.

Rivera says she was fortunate to qualify for a P20,000-loan extended by the Ecumenical Church Loan Fund (Eclof). “A great advantage of Eclof’s agricultural loans is that we can start paying after we start harvesting,” says Rivera.

Eclof is a Geneva-based interchurch, nonprofit organization which extended funds now being managed by Eclof-Philippines.

Eclof-Philippines follows what Eclof Baguio branch manager Valentina Tangib describes as “flexible policy” for agricultural loans.

“Before, our policy for small business and agricultural loan repayment was uniform in which we collect loan payments monthly,” Tangib says.

Tangib and her staff found that farmers had difficulty repaying their loans since they could only start earning after three months after they began harvesting. Since five years ago, they have made it a policy that agricultural loan clients are given eight months to fully pay their loans.

Unlike other farmers who can afford to install a green house so they can harvest any time of the year, Rivera, however, says she is still lucky because strawberry prices never went down.

And Rivera acknowledges one factor—the festival season.

In the village of Ambiong, Meling Telcagan, a cutflower farmer specializing in growing Malaysian mums (a species of chrysanthemum) has been applying the art of correct timing for her crops.

From her 800-square-meter greenhouse-covered flower farm, Telcagan anticipates to start harvesting multicolored mums this month.

She expects to earn thrice as much on Valentine’s Day when a dozen of mums is priced at P250 to P300.

Practically the month of February is a good time for the likes of Telcagan, a 60-year-old mother of 11 children.

Cut flowers are expected to be in demand for the floral floats parade and competition, one of the main highlights of Panagbenga during the last weekend of February.

Other flower plots within Telcagan’s greenhouse are timed for March and April, the season of school graduation, and other plots are planned for June, the wedding month.