DA-8 to Put Up 18 Greenhouses

Growing Organically in Greenhouses

Tacloban City — The Department of Agriculture in Eastern Visayas is soon to construct and adopt a technology next month that will temper the effects of global warming and enables a stable plant production all-year-round, an agriculture official said.

According to Dr. Veronica Berenguer, high value vegetable crops coordinator, some farming areas throughout the region will be converted to greenhouse buildings with deep irrigations to adopt the so called protective cultivation with a fund of more than P5 million pesos coming from the government.

“This is to stabilize the production of some high valued crops and to minimize production losses in agricultural output during typhoon season,” Berenguer told Leyte Samar Daily Express in an interview.

Berenguer disclosed that the last year’s agricultural scenario with outputs that posted decline in terms of production brought the department to devise this plan to recover the losses of the region’s overall production.

“This construction of 18 greenhouse buildings that will be distributed in every province and selected cities and municipalities in the region will enable the farming sector to regain the agricultural losses and to cope up with the changing environment,” Berenguer stressed.

The agriculture official said that with this project, farmers would be able to apply the technology of protective cultivation that other farming regions in the country apply.

Under a protective cultivation, the natural environment such as temperature, humidity, light and carbon dioxide are modified for optimum plant growth.

Berenguer elaborated that the technology is a cropping technique wherein the micro climate surrounding of the plant body is controlled partially as per the requirement of the plant species grown during their period of growth.

“Quality of vegetables produced in our region are not on a competitive level, and imported high quality vegetables are starting to flood the market. So, with this, there is a great scope to improve the agricultural situation and to make the farming system a profitable venture for the farmers in Eastern Visayas,” Berenguer disclosed.

In the region, Berenguer informed that their department had earlier constructed two units of greenhouse buildings on 2007 at the Paranas, Samar and in Ormoc City. However, the former stopped its operations due to poor management while the unit granted to Ormoc City is still operational but is just used for seedling distributions.

This time, Berenguer said that the units would be fully operational throughout a year with members of the LGU’s vegetable organizations as the ones who will manage the building.

She added that the crops that will be cultivated under the greenhouse buildings will all be hybrid and high-yielding vegetables for market consumption.

By Leyte Samar Daily Express

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