Not too long ago, the phrase "Filipino young farmer" was considered contradictory. There were no young Filipino farmers anymore. The government even had to sound the alarm that if nothing was done, aging Filipino farmers would retire by 2026 with no successors in sight. But Covid-19 changed all these.
Now, a resurgence of interest in farming among the youth is being observed from Luzon to Visayas, all the way to Mindanao. Twenty-four young farmers interviewed for this story claim they only went into serious farming at the onset of the pandemic. All of them expressed optimism for the future of Philippine agriculture.
Dennis Ivan Chavez Baliguat, a 23-year-old computer engineer who just wanted to be a hacker, said the pandemic triggered in him the fear of a "zombie apocalypse." This led him and two friends to begin dabbling in hydroponics so they would have something to eat should the pandemic turn out to be their worst nightmare. Their hydroponic farm built on the rooftop soon became the Fresco-Greenovation agri-tech startup and won a grant in a Young Farmer Challenge competition.
Sisters Macor, 37, and Anne Martinez, 44, also had the same motivation, but minus the fear of zombies. Having grown up in a farming household in Porac, Pampanga, they thought of venturing into hydroponics in 2020 to grow lettuce and microgreens purely for personal consumption. "We just wanted to have healthy food that is readily available," Macor said. The sisters soon discovered that other people were looking for those things, too, leading them to turn their hobby into the Mizu Hydroponic and Microgreens Farm.
Read more at mb.com.ph