By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
As the corn craze continues to sweep across Tabuk City obliterating whatever remains of the once thick forest including coffee plantations, members of the Gunaban clan in Nambukayan, this city, are converting their coffee plantations into ginger patches.
There is a fundamental difference between turning a coffee plantation into corn land and to a ginger patch: in the former, the trees which include acacia and naturally grown trees like narra in the case of Tabuk City, are mowed down, but in the latter, the shade trees are spared because ginger thrives in partial shade.
A case in point is the half hectare plantation of Samuel Gunaban on a hillside in sitio Nansibakan. It has around 20 acacia trees which he himself planted in 1981 purposely to shade coffee trees.
Gunaban said he decided to convert his coffee plantation into ginger plantation in 2009 because of the plunge in the productivity of coffee in the area.
“Up to around 2000, a coffee tree could produce an average of half cavan of fresh coffee beans but now, it is good if 100 coffees trees could produce a cavan of coffee. Coffee was really a losing venture,” Gunaban said.
Gunaban said that the reduction in the productivity of coffee plus the better prices of corn is responsible for the near wiping out of coffee plantations in Nambukayan.
“A lot of our coffee farmers cut down their plantations to give way to rice or corn. They did not look for the best alternatives,” Gunaban, who with his 2.5 hectare total ginger production area is the leading ginger producer in the barangay, said.
He said that if farmers in Nambukayan switched to ginger, the campaign of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) for the stoppage in the cutting of trees would receive a boost as instead of cutting down their coffee shade trees, the local farmers preserve these.
Actually, ginger can expand the forest.
Amante Batalao, brother-in-law of Gunaban claims that currently tree-less areas could be converted into ginger plantations through the utilization of the fast-growing ipil-ipil trees.
“You could plant the ginger and the ipil-ipil at the same time and by the time the ginger are grown, they could be shaded by the ipil-ipil. Along with the ipil-ipil, plant acacia trees. You can cut down the ipil-ipil when the acacia are big enough to shade the ginger. That could take around seven years,” Batalao said.
Batalao admits though that the ginger grown under ipil-ipil is noticeably less robust than the ones grown under acacia trees because of the thin foliage of ipil-ipil. He said that the difference reflects on the harvest as ginger grown under good shade could produce as much as one kilo of rhizome while under ipil-ipil could only manage half of that at the maximum.
This writer observed in two ginger plantations that plants with excess sunlight are sallow.
Batalao said that the current 6.5- hectare ginger patches in Nambukayan all of which are partially shaded by trees used to be coffee plantations. He said that ginger could be grown under any tree except for the gmelina due to the water-absorbing capacity of the specie.
He said that they do not grow ginger in the open because when exposed to the sun, the rhizomes rot easily while under the trees the rhizomes could be preserved for months.
Former barangay captain Marcelo Gunaban extols ginger as the plant whose production does not occasion the destruction of trees. He is also bullish about the product saying that it generates more income than coffee, corn and rice, the leading crops in the barangay when it comes to the area planted.
He continued that the ginger is not perishable as it could remain in the soil for as long as three years and still be marketable, cannot be affected by typhoons and droughts, it is immune to plant diseases and with the minimal production cost, the sale amount is practically the gain.
To illustrate, former barangay kagawad Samuel Gunaban netted P400,000.00 from his half hectare plantation this year when the price of ginger reached P70.00 per kilo. This is from a harvest of 160 cavans of rhizome.
“The harvest could have been more had the plantation been better maintained,” Samuel said.
Samuel used the income to buy a second hand Izuzu Elf truck, his second vehicle bought from ginger farm gains the other being an owner-type jeep he purchased in 2007.
The benefits is shared with other people in the barangay because from the experience of Samuel, an estimated P45,000.00 goes to labor for the planting, cleaning and harvesting.
With his total 2.5 hectare ginger plantation, Samuel is the leadimg ginger planter in Nambukayan and most likely the entire Cordillera.
So far, with their total production area of 6.5 hectares, members of the Gunaban clan account for the at least 95 percent of the area planted to ginger in their barangay, the leading producer of the spice in the province and most likely, the entire Cordillera.**(To be continued)