MARITESS Mendoza, a plant grower in Laur, Nueva Ecija, set aside one-fourth of the 3.7 hectares of her agricultural land to experiment on the viability of biochar as a soil enhancer for onions and other high-value crops or HVCs.
In an interview with The Manila Times, Mendoza, an onion raiser, said she earned an additional P60,000 from the 16 tons of onions to which she had applied biochar, exceeding the usual 10 tons that she harvested in the past using commercial fertilizers.
With the promise shown by biochar, she also said she will again use it not only on onions but other HVCs as well, including corn and vegetables, in her newly bought five hectares of land for the next planting season.
Lauro Medina, a farmer tilling his 2,500-square meter rice field in San Leonardo town, also tried biochar on a portion of his property and saw an 18-percent increase of up to 5.9 tons in palay (unhusked rice) production.
Medina, in his video testimony, said a portion of the land that was not treted with biochar showed a decreasing yield from the usual 4-5 tons during the trials conducted in his demonstration farm during the dry season.
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He, however, also said the area treated with biochar registered an increase of one ton in output.
Biochar, or biological charcoal, is meant to be used as a soil enhancer.
Introduction of biochar by Singaporean firm Alcom Pte. Ltd. to the provincial government of Nueva Ecija in August 2022 resulted in a joint venture agreed upon by Gov. Aurelio Umali and Prateek Tiwari, Alcom’s founder and managing director; Siddarth Kaul of Alcom’s global lead for carbon; and lawyer Rodeo ”Doddie” Nuñez, managing director of Alcom-Philippines.
The soil enhancer will be branded as “Nuevachar,” which is expected to help protect the enviroment amid a threat of global warming and climate change and to educate farmers on minimizing production costs even as they adopt modern farming.
To date, Nuñez said, the provincial government’s biochar processing facility in Palayan City has produced five tons of biochar.
The weight of biochar is 18 kilos per bag/sack and the 5 tons produced are equivalent to 27,777 bags of the enhancer.
Nuñez said the processing facility recently passed an audit conducted by a team from International Registry and will now wait for issuance of carbon credit certification before going into full-blast operation.
Upon the issuance, Alcom-Philippines will be the first-ever registrant of the product in the country, Nuñez said.
Over the weekend, Alejandro Abesamis, the provincial administrator, ordered the immediate distribution of the 27,777 bags of biochar to the 27 towns and five cities of Nueva Ecija.
Abesamis, also in an interview with The Times, said the biochar will be tested within 120 days i at least two trials during this rainy season and the dry season in 2024.
Some 225 hectares were set aside in the province for the municipalities and cities that will serve as pilot areas in the application of biochar, he added.
Dr. Carlo Torres, Alcom’s chief agriculturist, said biochar as a soil amendment will protect the environment against global warming and climate change precisely because it is able to break the carbon cycle.
Torres added that “biochar is the solid material obtained from the thermochemical conversion of biomass in an oxygen-limited environment.”
Application of biochar aligns with the nation’s rice food security that is pushed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., concurrent Agriculture secretary.