Agriculture.ph Blog

Tissue culture boosts Tarlac’s food sufficiency, organic farming

IT’S boom time for agriculture in Tarlac.

The province has recorded the highest yield per hectare in rice and corn production in the region in recent years, simply because it pioneered in adopting modern technology.

The local officials’ target is to help boost food sufficiency.

Now, even academe is providing its share in agricultural modernization. Located in the town of Camiling is the Tarlac College of Agriculture (TCA), which has been at the forefront of tissue-culture technology.

Dr. Ester Mercado, dean of the TCA’s Institute of Agriculture, says this is the reason Tarlac is now a key banana-growing province, particularly the lacatan variety. Today banana plantations have mushroomed in the province because of the propagation of tissue-cultured planting materials.

Although they are now producing several varieties of bananas, including the cardaba (or saba), banana plantations are also emerging as the region’s main source for sweet-potato materials and the more sophisticated macadamia nuts.

She said Tarlac Gov. Victor Yap is personally promoting tissue culture, which incidentally was started in 2005 through the funding facilitated by his father, Rep. Jose Yap, when he was still governor.

Through tissue culture, TCA can produce at least 600 plantlets from one mother plant, compared with the traditional propagation method, which can only produce four suckers in a banana mother plant.

“We find it really worthy,” says Mercado, a horticulturist. Their students are not only motivated; the school has managed to generate much-needed additional income to sustain its research and development (R&D) programs.

For instance, she says the school now sells each macadamia seedling for P1,000. It’s not surprising that small and big landowners have been getting orders, knowing that one kilo of macadamia nuts in the market sells for P1,000.

The college is also providing the link between biotechnology, with its success in tissue culture, and Tarlac’s thrust in promoting organically grown crops.

According to Mercado, to compliment their tissue culture, they have been promoting organic-fertilizer production.

Today they have developed two types of fertilizers: one using beneficial microorganisms or biofertilizers; and the other through vermi-worm composting, which is naturally organic.

Mercado says their tissue-cultured sweet-potato varieties already helped increase the farmers’ yield. Initially, they used their biotech seedlings for their extension programs in the rural towns of Tarlac.

Lately, they are already being flooded by farmers from nearby provinces who have seen how disease-free varieties from the tissue-cultured plants helped increase Tarlac farmers’ yield. Since small farmers are benefiting from this technology, TCA continues to sell its sweet-potato plantlets for as low as 25 centavos per planting material.

Today, she said, Central Luzon’s sweet-potato production has increased by 50 percent due to the propagation of tissue-culture planting materials.

Because of their success in sweet potato, the TCA sweet-potato planting material team, led by Dr. Lilibeth Larangan, was cited in the Pag-Asa Award of the Civil Service Commission (CSC).

The team also included Dr. Ernesto Viray, Dr. Elsa Molina, Dr. Cielito Beltran, Dr. Teresita Navarro, Judith Espiritu, Maria Elena Caguioa, Maribel Ramales, Rizalina Tablarin, Leonell Lijuoco, Celso Torres, Imelda Alegado and Freddie Felix.

The College of Business programs, the income-generating arm of the college, is promoting products such as the production and marketing of tissue-culture seedlings to minimize the farmers’ dependence on commercial-production inputs.

In 2008 the TCA president was given the Pag-asa Award by the CSC for instituting reforms that ensured the prudent use of financial resources and innovative programs that generated additional income for the college.

Written by Joel C. Paredes

Source: Business Mirror