Ilocano Pinakbet Has A Pest Management Lesson For You!

Main image: Locusts big and small. My screen capture of a video of a locust swarm wanting to feast on an unidentified cornfield, video by a non-Filipino shared on Facebook by SRO[1]. My reaction was, in 1 word: “Monocropping.” It is monoculture that brings the plague of pests anywhere in the world.

I meant, if a few locusts find a large tract of cornfield, they will feast on it and grow in numbers – and attack the next cornfield in greater number, and so on and so forth. A law of Mother Nature.

In monoculture, there is no balance of nature. Why don’t we have swarms of locusts in the Philippines when we also grow corn? Because we don’t have very wide fields of corn like those in Africa (where the above video probably comes from).

Pranav Baskar has written, “Locusts Are A Plague Of Biblical Scope In 2020. Why? And ... What Are They Exactly[2]? ” (14 June 2020, NPR). Among other things, he says, ”Hundreds of millions of the insects have arrived in Kenya, where they're destroying farmland" –

Titanic swarms of desert locusts resembling dark storm clouds are descending ravenously on the Horn of Africa. They're roving through croplands and flattening farms... unprecedented threat to food security.

We don’t have to live in Africa to learn the Lesson of the Locusts: Look for natural enemies of the locusts. The Department of Agriculture of Australia[3] has a list of such natural enemies: wasps, flies, mites, nematodes, protozoans, fungi, bacteria and viruses, predators.

The same story with diseases that devastate your rice or onion or sugarcane or whatever crop. If you don’t have crops that encourage the multiplication of the natural enemies of those pests and diseases, you get only the pests and diseases!

To avoid having to resort to insecticides and fungicides, farmers have the choice of multiple cropping, intercropping or simply trap cropping – except that these are not being emphasized by farm technicians, and I have yet to read my alma mater, UP Los Baños underscoring such types of cropping.

My favorite “model” for a farm that enjoys a natural balance of populations of insects, worms and so on is the planting in same field of the Pinakbet Vegetables: tomato, eggplant, string bean, okra, and ampalaya (bitter gourd). That is to say, the insects that love the tomatoes have to contend with the insects that love the eggplant and those that love the string bean and so on – no, they cannot multiply to an infestation population.

About the pinakbet, it is cooked with a little bit of pork, preferably belly. The Ilocano pinakbetis short for pinakebbet, made to shrink – each of the ingredients in that mix is made to shrivel by cutting only tips of vegetables and not opening the pot while cooking is going on. That’s keeping your health inside those things. (Pinakbet image from Busy Beta[4], where the squash makes it a Tagalog pinakbet.)

The Ilocano pinakbet is a lesson in healthy cooking – but first, healthy farming!@517

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[1]https://www.facebook.com/100039782648500/videos/273557047313715/
[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/14/876002404/locusts-are-a-plague-of-biblical-scope-in-2020-why-and-what-are-they-exactly
[3]https://www.agriculture.gov.au/pests-diseases-weeds/locusts/about/about_locusts4]https://busy.org/@zoeroces/pinakbet-of-ilocano