Indigenous Farming Practices in the Philippines: Old Ways of Doing, New Ways of Thinking for our Food Systems

Indigenous farming practices are local knowledge developed in a community that accumulated from farmers’ experiences and practices through time. No communities practice exactly the same farming strategies because indigenous knowledge arose from a community’s unique history of survival. Before modern agriculture, early farmers adopted practices they learnt from doing farming themselves. Some of these techniques, such as pruning of grapes, became the foundation of modern agricultural technologies. One of the reasons for their adoption in modern agriculture is that these approaches can be explained by science. Pruning, for example, helps balance the partitioning of photosynthates between the vine and the fruits, reducing the number of fruiting sites and the size of the vegetative system, and resulting in bigger clusters. Sustainable farming technologies derived from indigenous knowledge can provide solutions to the challenges of our modern food systems; however, scientific explanations behind these practices are often lacking, which limits their widespread use. A few indigenous farming practices from the Philippines are presented in this blog article, including an attempt to provide scientific explanations behind these approaches.

Old Ways of Doing, New Ways of Thinking

In the province of Albay in the Philippines, farmers usually practice planting sweet potato between rows of either upland rice or maize plants. This practice is called patubak, and it is done to suppress weed growth, to harvest more food, and to earn more income. In modern agriculture, patubak is closely related to relay cropping. The positive effects of relay cropping on farm productivity and farmers’ income have been shown by many studies and has been reviewed. Regarding maize and sweet potato relay cropping, a study performed in Ethiopia found that the population of maize negatively affected the root yield of sweet potato. This was attributed to large maize canopy and shortage of soil moisture due to delayed transplanting. More experimental studies are needed to test the different conditions of cultivation of maize, rice, sweet potato, and other crops under relay cropping to validate the effectiveness of patubak in increasing harvest and income.

Another interesting practice amongst farmers in Albay is the use of the seeds from the middle part of the maize ear/cob as planting materials. Seeds close to both ends of the cob are discarded. Farmers believe that those seeds have a low germination rate and plants germinating from them have poor growth performance. Following a similar concept, there was a study in maize that examined seed size and seed position on the cob and their effects on the leaf area of the resulting maize plants (maize hybrid, cv. Furio). In this study, it was found that seeds from the base of long cobs developed into bigger-leafed plants than those seeds obtained from the middle and the tip of the cob. Plants grown from large seeds also exhibited larger leaf area and earlier development compared to those grown from small seeds. This is different from what farmers in Albay have observed, and it is necessary to further test under which conditions, seed treatments, and maize varieties these indigenous approaches can be applied.

In many provinces in the Philippines, indigenous practices regarding seed preservation are followed by farmers and their families. In Sorsogon, a neighboring province from Albay, as well as in Albay, farmers store unthreshed seeds like rice and maize cobs above traditional stoves that burn wood and produce smoke or hang them in a smoky area of the kitchen. The smoke serves as an insect and pest repellent. Farmers from both provinces also maintain viability of vegetable seeds by spraying them with achuete (or sapran in the local language) (Bixa orellana) leaf extract. It is believed that achuete extracts can prevent fungal infection of the seeds. In a review, achuete has been shown to exert anti-bacterial and anti-fungal activities, partially validating this seed preservation practice.

Hanging of corn ears above the traditional firewood stove to protect the seeds from pests (Photo: Dr. Lester M. Narvaez, Bicol University, Philippines)

The Coexistence of the Indigenous and the Modern

There are many approaches and indigenous farming knowledge around the world that remain undocumented, and which have not been integrated into modern agricultural practices. Some indigenous knowledge stems from religious beliefs and superstitions, but much was derived from experiences and observations of farmers that were acquired through time and through actual involvement in farming. These indigenous practices might have scientific bases and explanations, but sadly, they are slowly being forgotten and partially abandoned due to socio-economic factors, such as loss of inter-generational transfer of knowledge to the younger generation. It is important to document indigenous knowledge and validate it scientifically because modern agriculture could learn a lot from it.

To read more:

Narvaez LM. (2020). Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) in Crop Farming in Albay Province, Philippines: An Analysis for Validation Studies. BU R&D Journal. 23(2): 78-86.
Possingham JV. (1994). New Concepts in Pruning Grapevines. In Horticultural Reviews, J. Janick (Ed.).
Tanveer M, Anjum SA, Hussain S. et al. (2017). Relay cropping as a sustainable approach: problems and opportunities for sustainable crop production. Environ Sci Pollut Res. 24: 6973–6988.
Kidane BZ, Hailu MH, Haile HT. (2019). Evaluation on Compatibility of Maize and Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato Relay Cropping Through Spatial and Temporal Arrangement, Tigray, Ethiopia. Journal of Agriculture and Aquaculture. 1(2).
Pommel B, Goytino B, Bonhomme R. (1995). Effects of seed size, seed position on the parent cob and parental cob size on the leaf area of maize under field conditions. European Journal of Agronomy. 4(3): 363-369.
Ocbian MM, Lasim MP. (2015). Eco-Friendly Indigenous Farming Practices among Sorsoguenos in Sorsogon, Philippines. JPAIR Multidisciplinary Research. 19(1).
Nascimento Moraes Neto R, Guedes Coutinho G, de Oliveira Rezende A. et al. (2020). Compounds isolated from Bixa orellana: evidence-based advances to treat infectious diseases. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Químico – Farmacéuticas. 49(3): 581-601.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Oñate Narciso is a current Future Food Fellow at the Laboratory of Food Biochemistry, ETH Zürich. She studied plant biology for her PhD, focusing on plant cell walls, which led to her desire to work in Food Biochemistry. Coming from the Philippines and with grandparents who worked in and owned farms back home; agriculture, food systems, and the lives of farmers have always been her personal interest and passion. She hopes to raise awareness of the situation of small-scale farmers and their communities through her science and her writing.

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Lester M. Narvaez of Bicol University, Philippines, for kindly providing the photos of indigenous farming practices and indigenous knowledge system (IKS) practiced in Albay, Philippines. His work, which aimed to explain these farming practices, also inspired me to write this blog article.