How We Filipinos Can Produce Rotavators Cheaply, Make Our Soils & Farmers Richer Automatically – And Make Climate Change For The Better!

Why do Filipino farmers remain poor? Manuel Reyes, research professor at Kansas State University, gives 2 reasons. One, they keep using expensive imported farm machinery. Two, they keep applying expensive chemical fertilizers.

Mr Reyes is an alumnus of UP Los Baños, with BS & MS degrees in Agricultural Engineering; currently, among other things, he is the principal investigator for “Promoting Conservation Agriculture For Vegetable Growers In Cambodia And Nepal” (UCDavis FeedTheFuture, horticulture.ucdavis.edu).

Last month, he was one of the resource persons at the “Philippine Open Systems Agriculture Machinery Manufacturing Workshop” during the Regenerative Agriculture International Conference at May’s Garden in Bacolod City, that ended 06 July (Carla Gomez, 07 July 2022, “Reliance On Imported Machines, Fertilizers Keeping PH Farmers Poor – Expert,” Inquirer.net, newsinfo.inquirer.net).

Ms Carla quotes Mr Reyes as saying during the conference:

We need to focus on agriculture where the money returns to the community. We are dependent on sophisticated foreign machines that our farmers do not need. We need simple machines made by Filipinos for Filipinos.

“Reyes also stressed the need to focus on organic agriculture and the use of locally produced fertilizer. Organic fertilizer produced by local farmers will free the country from having to buy expensive imported fossil fuel-based fertilizer. Organic farming will also enable farmers to diversify into other crops, protect the environment and biodiversity, and boost the health of the people.”

Ms Carla also said:

“Ramon Uy, President of the RU-Ecological and Agricultural Development Foundation Inc that hosted the international conference, said the production of local farm machinery will provide jobs and organic fertilizer will be additional sources of income for farmers.”

Now then, Mr Uy, I have an inventor’s concept of a rotavator we can manufacture locally, cheaply. This machine we will invent is such that even as it cultivates the soil, it multiplies the terrestrial value as it creates a layer of organic fertilizer on top of that field automatically.

So: Locally made rotavator, check!
Location-specific automatic organic fertilizer, check!
1 invention, multiple values, check!

Where to invent it? Mr Uy, I’m thinking of UP Los Baños with its Agricultural Machinery Testing and Evaluation Center at the College of Engineering & Agricultural Technology (CEAT), which is accessible to many people – I am a UPLB alumnus, so there should not be any problem arranging for collaboration with the project. As CEAT is located nearby, we can invite IRRI as well as the PhilRice Los Baños Station as project collaborators. (Message me on Facebook for chat and/or email.)

I will call this dream device of PH farms now “OrganicMaker” – the name indicating that even as you operate the device, simultaneously it cuts the weeds and soil to pieces and mix them all at the same time in the same rotary motion – automatically producing an organic mulch. (And yes, our device will be easy to repair.)

Mr Uy, we will use the actual decades-long experience of my brother-in-law Enso Casasos whom I taught the “automatic organic-maker” use of an off-the-shelf rotavator!@517