TABUK CITY, Kalinga – Evangeline Licudo , 45, leader of one of the seven kabisilyas or farm service provider teams in barangay Dilag, this city, said they used to harvest at least 40 hectares a cropping season but with the entry of the harvester combines into the ricefields of the Tabuk Valley starting in 2010, they would be lucky to get 15 hectares.
Licudo said the only ricefields left to them in the Tabuk Valley are those which are too muddy for the combine harvesters to penetrate.
She said that in Cauayan City, Isabela where her group is now forced to look for work when they could not find any in the locality, they are limited to the ricefields whose soil is too sticky for the harvesters to move in.
Licudo said that if not for the muddy and sticky ricefields, their livelihood would have taken a far worse hit.
To somehow recoup a little of their lost income, the kabisilyas in Dilag have set higher rates for planting for the ricefields that are harvested by the mechanical harvesters.
She said that they collect P4,000.00 per hectare for the planting work plus P2.50 for each bundle for the pulling. For farmers who commit to give them the harvesting work, they charge P3,500.00 for the planting and P2.00 per bundle for the pulling.
Regarding the possibility that with the existence of the mechanical transplanter they will also soon lose the planting job, Licudo expressed confidence that that may not occur in the near future.
She said that the transplanter tested by the Department of Agriculture (DA) two years ago did not click among farmers because it is very slow and the distance from one plant to the other is too wide.
Licudo said that the transplanter could plant only half as fast as the kabisilyas.
“But when they perfect the equipment, we will have nothing more left,” Licudo whose husband and four children are also farmer workers, said in the vernacular.
City Agriculturist Julibert Aquino admits that farm service providers are bearing the brunt of the mechanization of farming in the valley.
He said that some years back, the DA tried to minimize the impact on the farm service providers by organizing them and providing them with farm machineries specifically power tiller, hand tractor and thresher.
“After several croppings, the threshers were no longer of any use because more and more farmers have bought harvesters,” Aquino said.
A farmer himself, Aquino said that he understands why farmers now opt to give the harvesting job to the harvesters as it cuts down the time involved and the expense.
He said that the average two days needed to have hectare ricefield reaped manually and threshed with the old model thresher has been reduced to four to five hours and the 15 cavans per 100 cavans that went to the reapers and owner of the thresher has been brought down to only seven to eight cavans.
The advantage in the speed of the work is very crucial during bad weather when farmers time their harvesting during lulls in the rain, Aquino said.
Aquino also said that the farmer no longer spends for food of the crew and also for the sacks.**By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
