While thousands of farmers across the province watched their fields parched from the prolonged dry spell, Roger Villegas stood beside stacks of freshly harvested palay on Wednesday, looking at an estimated P882,000 payoff.
Initial crop-cut sampling conducted by Department of Agriculture (DA) Caraga technicians during a local harvest festival showed Villegas’s six-hectare hybrid rice model farm in Barangay San Vicente reaching an initial projection of over 10 metric tons per hectare.
However, Alvin Catalan Asuncion, staff to DA Caraga Regional Executive Director Engr. Ricardo M. Oñate Jr., clarified that field sampling usually carries an estimated 30 percent disparity from actual production outcomes, tempering the realistic harvest to about seven metric tons per hectare.
Asuncion said the harvest at Villegas rice farm is still ongoing.
Scaled across Villegas’s entire six-hectare landholding, the adjusted 42-metric-ton output yields roughly 700 sixty-kilo bags of palay. At the prevailing fresh farmgate price of P21 per kilogram, this positions Villegas to gross P882,000.
‘I am very happy because our yield reached more than 10 metric tons per hectare,’ Villegas, chairman of the Agusan del Sur (ADS) Magkasama Irrigators Association, told agricultural stakeholders in Cebuano. ‘It is truly vital that we adapt to new technologies so we can improve our livelihood.’
His projected windfall comes at a critical time for local agriculture. In late September, the Sangguniang Panlalawigan placed Agusan del Sur under a state of calamity under Resolution No. 585-26 after prolonged El Niño conditions damaged 36.4 percent of agricultural commodities and slashed watershed water availability by nearly a third.
Provincial Agriculturist Armando Valiente earlier estimated farm losses at P3.5 billion, noting that water shortages left some 21,600 farmers unable to plant and shrank the July cropping area from the usual 45,000 hectares to roughly 8,000.
Yet inside the 100-hectare San Vicente model farm, established under the Department of Agriculture’s Masagana Rice Industry Development Program (MRIDP), high-yield hybrid seeds, specialized fertilizers, and intact communal irrigation told an entirely different story.
Villegas’s milestone is the second major production breakthrough in the province in less than a week. On Oct. 23 in Barangay Concepcion in Sta. Josefa town, smallholder Nilo Dalid shattered his previous ceiling of 76 bags from his 1.2-hectare plot by hauling in an actual harvest of 116 bags (totaling 7,888 kg of fresh palay), generating an immediate gross return of P165,648 at P21.00 per kilo.
Dr. Frisco Malabanan, senior consultant for the National Rice Program (NRP), said the sustained results across both irrigators’ groups provide tangible evidence for smallholders who remain cautious about adopting modern farming inputs.
‘The high yield demonstrated here serves as a concrete benchmark for ramping up rice production in Prosperidad and stands as an inspiration for other farmers to adopt the technology,’ Malabanan said