A group of 27 farmers and five farm technicians from San Fernando City, La Union, visited the Sarian Farm in Teresa, Rizal under the Lakbay-Aral (Travel & Learn) program of the city’s local government unit.

The group was led by city agriculturist Ms. Eduviges Flores. Like most Ilocano farmers, the participants are smallholder farmers. They wanted to pick up some ideas that could make cultivating a small farm profitable.

In our short lecture, we emphasized that there are many doable projects in a small farm that require very little capital. Like the production of camote tops, for instance. Camote tops are saleable in most markets and they are easy to produce with little capital to start with.

At the Sarian Farm, they also saw how fruit trees can be grown in containers. They also observed how easy it is to grow black pepper by letting them climb the trunk of mahogany trees. They also learned that there are special plants that can be bestsellers like the Honduras banana with very big bunch, sweet kamias, Vietnam pomelo, Abiu from Brazil, Longkong lanzones and many others.