We love ducks for their eggs which enjoys a popular market as balut sa puti, balut penoy, itlog na maalat or simply as table eggs. Ducks are also considered gourmet meat, as in roast duck, peking duck or pato tim. Duck liver, on the other hand, is processed into pâté in olive oil, meat pâté, meat “soppresata” and “bocconcini” for delis and upscale restaurants.
On the other hand, not so many are familiar with the rice-duck technology as a way to raise agricultural productivity. Farmers use ducks to enrich the soil at the least cost for double or triple the rice harvest in an ecologically friendly way.
The ducks fertilize the fields with their droppings, eat or crush snails, worms, bugs, stem borers and green leaf hoppers, eliminating the use of fertilizers and pesticides.
In Butuan, the Philippine Agrarian Reform Foundation for National Development (Parfund) recently inaugurated a ducky hatchery to help improve the lives of the agrarian reform program beneficiaries and help make them farmer entrepreneurs.
Weeks-old chicks are let loose as the farmers begin to plant rice. They swim and waddle on the waterlogged arena, bumping and tweaking the plants, thereby helping produce healthy grains.
The aeration fanned by underwater flutter kicks kills the anaerobic bacteria, which beget methane gas. Methane, along with carbon dioxide, traps heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming.
Around 150 ducks are needed for a hectare of rice. The expense is around P10,000, half of the amount for the net to pen the fowl and the rest for the acquisition of the chicks and feeds. Because the net is good for five years, that means cost will be cut in the succeeding years.
In comparison, investment in a rice field using fertilizers and pesticides is around P25,000 per hectare, in addition to manpower to control weeds and snails—the yummy duck favorites. The harvest is more than 5.8 tons of rice per hectare in the duck farm—nearly twice the yield from the chemical-energized paddies.
By the time the rice is harvested in about three and a half months, the birds are full-grown—to be sold in the market for their meat.
Or the ducks are allowed to lay eggs, which are turned into balut.
Parfund is headed by Jose Noel “Butch” Olano, a former agrarian reform undersecretary during President Fidel Ramos’ administration.
With a P6.7-million loan from the NGO Peace and Equity Foundation, Parfund constructed the breeding center and incubator, and purchased mother ducks to supply ducklings to some 1,800 farmers under a five-year project. It also secured a P2.16-million grant for program management, capacity building, field coaching and monitoring of farmers.
The duck-rice farming technology was developed in the late 1980s in Japan by Takao Furuno, an imaginative farmer who used ancient agro-ecological principles that do not require a large energy input but result in increased productivity.
During a visit to the Philippines, Furuno took Jose Apollo Pacamalan under his wing and got the Filipino to attend seminars that he conducted on the subject in Japan and South Korea, and to visit projects in Asia.
Pacamalan, 43, an agriculture graduate of Xavier University with a master’s degree in Environmental Management from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, introduced the technology in pilot projects of Parfund in Mindanao.
“You have to have a passion for this technology,” he said. “You have to think, sleep, eat duck all the time.”
He recalled that as a young farmhand, he used to spray rice fields with chemicals. “At the end of the day, I had a terrible headache because of the fumes I inhaled.”
Pacamalan is upbeat that the Parfund technicians are looking at ducks ending up as processed food for fine dining.
Adapted from: Ducks in frontline of anti-poverty war, by Fernando del Mundo, Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 24, 2013.
Photo: “<a href=”http://www.flickr.com//54106155@N00/2311402357″>one lphotosast look…</a>” by <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/54106155@N00/”>Keith Bacongco</a>, c/o Flickr. <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>Some Rights Reserved</a>