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.
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