THE MANOK PiNOY CHICKEN, A BREEDER’S PRIDE AND JOY

By Manny Pinol

More than half of my life was spent away from the farm where I was born, some of the years in Davao City where I went to college and many more years in Manila where I worked as a journalist.

But in all of those years, the desire to go home to the farm where the smell of new mowed grass and where the air is fresh and clean continuously gnawed my heart.

A tragedy in the family changed all that.

When my father, Bernardo Pinol Sr., who was running for mayor of M’lang in 1995, fell ill with barely two weeks before the elections, I was asked to come home from Manila to take over his candidacy.

I took over his candidacy and became Mayor of M’lang. My father died two months later from brain cancer.

The rest is part of M’lang’s and North Cotabato’s political history.

It was because of that unexpected coming home that my dream to return to the farm came true.

Making up for the years I was away from the farm, I developed the piece of land I acquired in Kidapawan City in 1993, right after I retired from the Manila Bulletin.

I planted it with mahogany seedlings, now ready to be used to build my dream house, and longkong lanzones now bearing fruit.

Most of all, the farm allowed me to do what I always wanted to do: breed animals – cattle, goats, carabaos and chicken.

But it was chicken breeding which gave me a lot of fulfillment because of the short period of time it takes for me to discover what my genetic experiments would yield.

Gamefowls, or the fighting roosters, which are used in the Philippines’ Number 1 sport – cockfighting – took a lot of my time.

It’s not really profitable, with a lot of people asking for roosters for free rather than buying them, but I found it to be a fulfilling hobby.

Little did I know that my experience in breeding gamefowls would equip me with a deep knowledge of chicken genetics to enable me to breed the “Manok PiNoy,” a new strain of backyard free-range chicken which I humbly believe would revolutionize the Philippine free-range chicken industry.

The production of native chickens has always been hampered by the fact that they could not be mass produced to satisfy the demands of the market.

They do not also have a common phenotype which would make a certain strain distinct and allow easier fowl management.

Most of all, their growth to marketable weight is very slow.

I was able to address almost all of these issues in the backyard chicken breeding industry.

Today, I and my brother, Pat, can proudly say that we can produce naturally grown, free-ranged backyard chicken, fed with locally available chemical-free feeds which could reach marketable weight in 75 to 90 days.

Most of all, the “Manok PiNoy” conforms to the general description and phenotype of the Oriental meat chicken which Filipinos prefer over the 27-day old broiler chicken.

Outside of politics now, the “Manok PiNoy” could yet prove to be a major contribution by an ex-politician to rural development in the country.

And I thank God for showing me that there is more to service to humanity that just being in politics.

(Photo caption: This 5-month-old Manok PiNoy cockerel hatched Aug. 10, 2013 weighed 2.4 kilos when scaled Jan. 11. Photo by Dodong Manzo)