The Solar-Powered Irrigation System (SPIS) which I introduced as one of the banner programs of the Department of Agriculture was actually a result of a travel I made to Aparri, Cagayan in May of 2016 shortly after then President-elect Rodrigo Duterte named me as his Agriculture Secretary.
In Aparri, I saw a great irony where rice farms just beside the huge Cagayan River were without irrigation water for the very simple reason that the banks were too deep and there was simply no way to bring the water up to the fields.
Seeing that, I remembered what a Filipino-American friend in Coachella Valley, Southern California, Rocky French, did when he built Tilapia fishponds in the middle of the desert in Thermal City.
He established several Solar Panels in his farm to power huge pumps which drew water from as deep as 300-meters for his Tilapia fishponds.
Since I still had over a month before officially assuming the post of DA Secretary, I travelled to California and asked Rocky if he could help me design and build a proto-type of a Solar-Powered Irrigation System which would draw water from deep rivers into reservoirs and irrigate rice fields.
Rocky formed a team of friends which included American solar engineer Moses Khuu, Kyu Whang, Gabriel Esparagoza and journalist Winchell Campos and built the proto-type in New Janiuay, M’lang, Cotabato.
On Feb. 6, 2017, President Duterte visited New Janiuay and launched the DA Solar-Powered irrigation Project.
Funding for about 160 units was included in the 2018 budget and by March 2018, one of the first units to be completed, the Manubuan SPIS was operational.
Before the construction of the SPIS, Manubuan farmers led by a retired Ilocano teacher and former vice mayor of Matalam, Tranquilino Pulanco, planted rice once a year by relying on the rain.
On Wednesday, I joined old man Pulanco and the other farmers in a harvest festival where they slaughtered a native goat along with catfish caught from the water impounding from which the SPIS draws water.
From one harvest a year with an average yield of 3-metric tons per hectare, the farmers now could harvest 3 times a year and the availability of water increased their yield to 7 metric tons or an annual yield of 21 metric tons.
I am sharing this Water success story because from the start of the SPIS projects, there were so many naysayers and non-believers who even claimed that DA was wasting billions for a useless project.
In fact, a nation-wide SPIS program to irrigate 500,000-hectares to be funded by a P40-B loan from Israel had been languishing in a bureaucratic limbo more than two years after I left the Department.
It is my wish that this story of the Manubuan farmers’ success backed by a video material will finally convince the economic planners of the country to approve the Israeli-funded SPIS program.
Hopefully, they would realize that Water is life and that Food Grows Where Water Flows.
(This video material was prepared by the media team of the Mindanao Development Authority.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1itPRr2sV2fu_SjfXBbKUid64bK8179LA/view?fbclid=IwAR0F3ZLS61pOqr57j2254S_cVt98W9Ke2j2IkTMWRAzuDXAOG7GHOQuRWvU
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