Indigenous Strategies of Sustainable Farming Systems in the Highlands of Northern Philippines

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indigenous strategies have been practiced in the Philippine uplands and they have maintained the sustainability of upland farming systems for generations. A collaborative activity among researchers, extensionists and practitioners from UPLB, BSU, HARRDEC, ICRAF, DENR-CAR, DA-CHARM, and NCIP was carried out to document and understand the indigenous strategies of farming systems in Bayyo, Mt. Province. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) activities including transect lines, resource mapping, key informant interviews, and mind mapping were conducted with selected participants from the community. Most households in Bayyo maintain three production systems: irrigated rice fields (payew), permanent swidden (katualle), and shifting cultivation (uma) plots. All three production systems are essential for their survival. Local people practice a variety of indigenous strategies to sustain productivity in these production systems. These include terracing, crop rotation, mixed cropping, soil fertility management, and the sweetpotato cropping system. Payew fields are flat terraces built along the mountainsides with terrace sides fortified with stone walls. These fields are irrigated with water from nearby spring water to grow paddy rice. Terracing is also practiced in the katualle to reduce the steepness of the slope of the fields and to reduce soil erosion. Different systems of crop rotation and mixed cropping of rice, sweet potato, and peanuts are practiced in the three production systems to sustain crop productivity. Soil fertility in the payew fields is maintained by the application of the indigenous species Tithonia diversifolia. Laying removed weeds around sweetpotato plants as mulch is the main soil fertility management and weed control in the katualle fields. Fallowing is an important component of the shifting cultivation cycle in the uma fields. Sweet potato is the second staple food crop in Bayyo and farmers keep a collection of a diverse array of sweet potato varieties suited to different growing conditions and with varying characteristics of growing season length, herbage yield, drought tolerance and tuber storage longevity. PRA results have shown that indigenous practices kept the upland farms in Bayyo sustainable through the years.