Organic Farming, and Community Spirit, Buy a Typhoon-Battered Philippine Town
KIDAY, Philippines — Gloomy skies don’t dampen the spirit of Virginia Nazareno as she happily waters organic vegetables on an April morning in Kiday, a sitio or hamlet on the banks of the Agos River at the southern tip of the Sierra Madre mountain range.
“Our pechay are so big, customers are amazed,” the 66-year-old says, pointing the sprinkler to the foot-high leafy vegetables. “They say it’s their first time to see pechay as large as these.
“They ask what fertilizer do I apply? I reply, ‘It’s just organic materials, no chemical fertilizers,’” says Nazareno, the farmer-leader of the Kiday Community Farmers’ Association (KCFA).
The organization has 35 members, 30 of them women aged 30 and above, including Nazareno. Based in Quezon province on the Philippines’ main island of Luzon, the group was formed and introduced to organic farming in 2005 through the Social Action Center, a Catholic Church-led nonprofit. The assistance came following four successive tropical cyclones that battered the area in November 2004, causing the Agos River to swell, inundating homes and farms and killing more than 1,000 people.