Not waiting for a response, I want to strike while the
iron is hot – especially that I just discovered this, from Iya Gozum (title edited): “Dr
Romulo Davide: ‘There Are No Barren Soils, Only Barren Minds’” (23 Aug 2024, Rappler, rappler.com).
(image from graymatte.rs/blog)
Soils, minds. Why
my extraordinary interest? Because Filipino farmers, always treating their
soils as barren, are always applying 1 or 2 kinds of chemical fertilizers on them
– thereby, their crops grow biologically attractive as food, so they get all
kinds of pests and diseases!
I repeat: “There are
no barren soils, only barren minds.”
Ms Gozum says, “Davide's work provides farmers with
an alternative to chemical pesticides and helps empower farmers by 'equipping
them with scientific knowledge'.” Mr Davide’s professional work was much
research for the biological control of nematode pests – and thus he is known as
the “Father of Plant
Nematology.”
But his statement “There are no barren soils, only
barren minds” also strikes me differently; and so I say:
Farmer: If you
think you have an infertile soil, think again! With the “magic” of my technique
with the rotavator, any rotavator, you will know that you have only an
infertile mind, but not an infertile soil!
That is why I came
up with my Saturday challenge to former PhilRice Director Santiago R Obien (SRO) and PhilRice Los
Baños Station for us to conduct a techno-demo on my innovative technique of
using the rotavator, any rotavator for that matter, so that: The cultivation
will automatically, yes, automatically produce
organic matter!
Rotavating to produce automatically mixed pieces of
soil and plant matter that will decay and act exactly like an organic
fertilizer is not mentioned by any of the many manufacturers of rotavators or
rotary tillers the world over. This one has been mentioned by me once, twice,
many times over the years – because I was the one who intuited-discovered the
process.
In “IRRI,
PhilRice, The Rotavator & Lorenzo’s Secret” (27 April 2020, iTHINK! Journalism, blogspot.com), I wrote:
I have a 55-year direct experience with the Howard
rotavator in my hometown Asingan in eastern Pangasinan. That 1965, I was
instructing the driver of the big tractor not to set the blades to any depth
but just drive through the field… My brother-in-law Lorenzo Casasus, was there
at that time; in later years he copied the shallow cultivation with his
Kuliglig hand tractor and rototiller. The results? His neighbors could not
match his yields even if they tried to copy all his methods – he did not tell
them about the “magic” that his rototiller was doing.
Like Filipino National Scientist Romulo Davide says,
“There are no barren soils, only barren minds!”@517
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