Roger Gualberto adjourned the board meeting grinning from ear to ear. As president of the group, he has just announced that the income gained from hosting a recent event is more than enough to implement the organization’s work plan for the year.

Though perhaps reminiscent of a scene in a posh boardroom in Makati, the gathering was actually held in a small conference room at the Department of Agriculture office in Davao City, and the members of the board were not corporate executives but a group of small-scale vegetable farmers. The only “corporate” link in this group was Roger, former vice president for marketing of the Phinma Group of Companies.

lure of the land

Although a veteran of the corporate world, there was no looking back for Roger after hanging up his executive leather shoes for a pair of farmers’ rubber boots. In fact, Roger is used to getting his hands dirty with farm soil. At age seven, he started out as a farm laborer in his aunt’s corn field and later at his cousin’s poultry farm, which he tended until he finished college.

Roger, now 57, considers his journey from the farm to the higher echelons of the corporate world as one of his major accomplishments. However, life as a senior officer in a Top 1000 company was not always fulfilling and Roger often dreamed of “going back to the land.” The land, in this case, was a 27-hectare property in Kapatagan, a barangay in Digos City, Davao del Sur, situated in the foothills of Mount Apo.

Today, Roger is proud to say that he has not only mastered the science of growing most common local vegetables, such as carrots and potatoes, but also pioneered the production of radishes and sweet peas in Kapatagan. As an ancillary business, Roger put up in December 2002 a retail store for his produce; now, he already delivers high-value vegetables to hotels and restaurants in Davao City.

Roger has become one of Mindanao’s leading practitioners and champions of raising vegetables through the use of chemical-free growing protocols. He produces bio-fumigated potatoes and diadegma semiclausum. Bio-fumigation is a natural method of controlling soil-borne diseases like bacterial wilt and rot, while diadegma is an insect that feeds on the diamondback moth, a pest that plagues such vegetables as cabbage, broccoli, and lettuce.

empowering farmers

Even as his own farming venture flourished, Roger began to realize the harsh realities of the vegetable farming business. At Kapatagan’s vegetable trading post, where Roger initially sold his produce, he noticed that farmers were generally price-takers when selling their produce. He observed that most farmers did not understand the long-term price potential of their produce, and therefore sold their crops for any price offered to meet immediate cash needs.

Attracted to its vision, Roger joined the Vegetable Industry Council of Southern Mindanao (VICSMin) in 2003. Through the council, he hoped to access support for the Maharlika Farmers Cooperative that he co-founded in Kapatagan, as well as to contribute to uplifting marginal farmers’ quality of life.

Roger has since assumed the presidency of VICSMin. Under his leadership, VICSMin has leveraged the assistance given by the USAID’s Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) Program to network with other potential donors, partners, and government agencies. As a result of such relationships, VICSMin has been able to undertake a myriad of activities that include organizing local and national events, conducting training sessions geared toward the improvement of vegetable production, and holding seminars designed to educate farmers on the proper handling of their produce from postharvest to marketing. Last year, VICSMin trained 117 farmers in vegetable production and marketing.

Presently, VICSMin has already established itself as a powerful and effective industry organization representing the interests of vegetable growers in Southern Mindanao. With GEM’s financial and technical support and the Department of Agriculture’s network, VICSMin is now widely recognized and highly respected even beyond Mindanao. In fact, Roger was even invited to Chile to attend a Global Learning Network Workshop on capacity building for small farmers’ organizations and speak about the experiences of local vegetable farmers in the Philippines.

sharing new ideas

Such foreign trips have given Roger an opportunity to network and learn new ideas and technologies that he can share with VICSMin members, who now number 95 organizations representing 1,100 farmers. In Chile, Roger saw how agrarian reform beneficiaries are highly organized and have adopted cluster farming. He hopes that VICSMin’s aggressive campaign for a similar clustering approach will also empower farmers in Southern Mindanao. “We were finally able to conduct training on vegetables, with an emphasis on upgrading farmers’ knowledge in marketing and encouraging them to organize into clusters, so they will have better bargaining power in the market when it comes to pricing,” Roger says.

The training also orients farmers on how to utilize the Gulayan sa Timog Mindanao (GTM), VICSMin’s marketing arm located inside the Bankerohan Public Market in Davao City. The GTM was designed to sell members’ produce in bulk to institutional buyers, such as supermarkets, hotels, hospitals, and restaurants. The GTM is a recent initiative and is not yet fully implemented. Nevertheless, Roger is optimistic that it will follow the path of the successful NorminVeggies Consolidation Center in Cagayan de Oro, which is being operated by the Northern Mindanao Vegetable Producers Association, another GEM-assisted producer organization.

Convincing small farmers to abandon engrained traditional approaches to growing and marketing in favor of newer, less-familiar strategies is not a simple matter. Roger explains, “I was once like them, so it is easy for me to interact with them. You need to have a large vault of patience because it is not easy teaching people to improve their technology. We are also dealing with decades of practices and habits that need to be enlightened if you want to uplift their quality of life.”

He hopes that VICSMin will be able to educate more small farmers in such areas as access to credit, new and improved production and postharvest-handling technologies, markets and marketing information, and agricultural policies and how these policies can affect their lives as vegetable farmers.

priceless fulfillment

Roger has been very busy balancing his time between his own vegetable business and the various activities of VICSMin. Recently, he has become even busier after being selected by the Catholic Relief Services as its consultant in the implementation of development work that benefits farmers’ groups in rural areas.

“I think I am doing financially okay because I can still afford a bottle of beer or two,” he jokingly says. Then on a more serious note, he reflects, “I am actually happy because life at the farm is so peaceful and the sense of fulfillment I get from our organization’s accomplishments is priceless. When I was still in the corporate world, my life was all about running after time or time running after me. Today, time does not manage me; I manage my time—even if I’m the president.” Rubber boots, anyone?

Contributed by the Growth with Equity in Mindanao Program, a USAID-funded program implemented under the oversight of the Mindanao Economic Development Council. For more information on the GEM Program, visit www.mindanao.org