Loves Is Better

Did you know that the one honored on Valentine’s Day is Roman Catholic? St Valentine . He loved lovers, especially the young ones. And today, let me be St Valentine and encourage the young writers to cultivate Creative Writing as their love! This month, February, is also “National Arts Month [1] ” (Psyche Roxas Mendoza, 23 February 2021, BusinessMirror.com ). Under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), Ms Psyche says: As stated in its mandate, the NCCA’s National Arts Month celebrates the country’s best artists and artistic movements in the fields of Architecture and Allied Arts, Cinema, Dance, Dramatic Arts, Literary Arts, Music, and the Visual Arts. I’m a creative writer, and I know creative writing is an art – why does the NCCA list of arts exclude creative writing? So what if the subject matter of my creative essays is almost always Agriculture , which is Science, which is a huge world, a technical universe, not understood if not explained? Which is why ...

Above: That is how America looks at numbers today (image [1]  from The MIT Press, mitpress.mit.edu ). It’s literal, not literate. It’s serial, not progressive. It’s sequential, not consequential. It’s mathematical, not magical! Again, waking up from a dream: This morning (Friday), I’m coming up with something New from something Old. Today is 13. But that is only in the manner of mathematics. These are mundane numbers: 1. 1 is 1. 1 is 1 in 2. 1 is 1 in 3. 1 is 1 in 4. 1 is 1 in 5. 1 is 1 in 6. 1 is 1 in 7. 1 is 1 in 8. 1 is 1 in 9. 1 is 1 in 10. 1 is 1 in 11. 1 is 1 in 12. 1 is 1 in 13….. One. One is One in One. One is One in Two. One is One in Three. One is One in Four. One is One in Five. One is One in Six. One is One in Seven. One is One in Eight. One is One in Nine. One is One in Ten. One is One in Eleven. One is One in Twelve. One is One in Thirteen….. That is counting in Total, in Company. You should count in Strength, in Unity! Like these...

Murder, I write. “The traders did it!” he said. I’m putting words into the mouth of Secretary of Agriculture William Dar. What he actually said was this, as quoted by Ralf Rivas (25 January 2021, “DA Proposes Price Freeze, More Imports As Pork Soars To P450/Kilo [1] ,” Rappler.com ): “Opportunistic businesses… manipulating the prices of basic necessities and prime commodities." Ham was already costing as high as P 400/kilo, while pork belly prices soared to P 450/kilo. Rappler says, “(Mr) Dar noted that traders are the ones manipulating prices, since the break-even point for selling pork is only around P 105 per kilo.” P 400 is quadruple murder. Here comes a hero on a red horse, SMC President and COO Ramon S Ang, waving a flag that says, “Least Cost.” Mr Ang says, according to Madelaine B Miraflor (10 February 2021, “SMC Sets Wholesale Prices Of Its Pork And Chicken At ‘Least Cost [2] ’ , Manila Bulletin ): As a leading food manufacturer, we have a responsibility to the cons...

In 2014, I was one of the consultants in the team of UPLB professor Rene Rafael C Espino, for the Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity & Economic Support Services (ARCCESS) extension project of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), and we visited coops of farmers in La Union and Pangasinan (see my essay, 30 March 2014, “The Business Of What If? A Missing Tooth, Amazing Plan, [1] ”  Frank A Hilario ). We noted that the agrarian farmers were not even optimizing the equipment acquired through the DAR, even if their associations were supposed to be working as cooperatives. Here comes the news, “Many Farmers’ Coops Turn Inactive Due To Lack Of Managerial Skills – Study [2] ” by Karl R Ocampo (11 December 2020, Business.inquirer.net ) about the DAR’s Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organizations (ARBOs). There was a study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) titled “The Role of Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs) in Agriculture Value Chain,” and the conclu...

  Here is a different group that the PH Department of Agriculture (DA) under Secretary of Agriculture William Dar via the Special Area for Agricultural Development (SAAD) program of the DA is helping: 21 women in Barangay Taboc, Juban, Sorsogon manufacturing by hand herbal soaps based on extracts from their own garden produce: citrus, carrot, akapulko, and horseradish (malunggay) (Pauline Trixia Borja, 03 February 2021, “DA-ATI Trains SAAD FAs In Sorsogon Develop Herbal Soap As An Enterprise [1] , ” SAAD.da.gov.ph )   The women are the Taboc Organic Farmers Association. All their soaps use raw materials grown organically: Health soaps from healthy farms from healthy farmers. Ms Pauline says the Taboc herbal soap enterprise began in 2017, after a series of trainings carried out by the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) on the making of soap, liniment and ointment, and on turmeric processing. The Taboc women’s group are now creating different variants of their herbal soa...

Lea Santiago is not your typical female when it comes to thinking about agriculture – she is advanced. But in revealing her age? Googling for it, or what year she established her agriculture business setup Our Farm Republic (OFR), I can’t find the information. Anyway, I got interested in her when I saw the Facebook sharing above – “Our Farm Republic” is not your typical name for an agriculture setup. She is from Mangatarem, southernmost Pangasinan, sandwiched by Zambales in the west and by Tarlac in the east. “Mangatarem is primarily driven by agriculture [1] ”  ( Wikipedia ). And I must say, also in need of modernization. On the website “Our Farm Republic,” http://ourfarmrepublic.com, Ms Lea’s OFR says: We’re an integrated, diversified, organic farm in Mangatarem, Pangasinan that promotes agri-tourism and organic agriculture. We offer training and seminars, farm tours, fresh produce, and livestock. What strikes me about Ms Lea is that I can feel her enthusiasm about PH Agricultur...