About 141,000 hectares (ha) of Northern Mindanao’s farmlands have been identified as vulnerable to the impact of a long dry spell, prompting agriculture officials to remind farmers to weigh their options for the planting season.
‘September will be decisive for farmers,’ said Jose Apollo Pacamalan, regional executive director of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Northern Mindanao.
He said that with the El Niño fallout building up, farmers are faced with a hard choice of whether to plant or skip a new cropping cycle this month.
Citing advisories from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) of below-normal rainfall conditions for months, the DA-10 mapped out the areas which could be hardest hit and advised farmers to be discerning in investing in a cropping cycle.
Pacamalan said they already flagged 92,000 ha for corn and another 49,000 ha for palay that are categorized as vulnerable to El Niño because these are either rain-dependent or have no all-weather source of irrigation water.
The DA validated the data through municipal, city and provincial agriculture offices, which assessed local conditions, checked on soil moisture stress and evaluated the status of irrigation systems, including inventories of shallow tube wells and water impounding facilities.
Over 85,000 ha of paddies across the region, however, are unlikely to be affected by the dry spell, including about 11,000 ha in Valencia City, Bukidnon, being serviced by the Pulangi River Irrigation System. Also, there are about 24,000 ha of land within the watershed areas of Mt. Kitanglad and Mt. Kalatungan, also in Bukidnon, that could withstand droughts.
According to Anianita Fortich, who heads Pagasa Mindanao, meteorologists are seeing a ‘very strong’ El Niño shaping up after surface temperatures have breached over 2 degrees Celsius than usual and its peak could be felt sometime in November and December this year, with residual effects within the first quarter next year.
‘This could even be worse than the last three El Niño we had,’ said Fortich, referring to the droughts that parched farmlands across the country, including Northern Mindanao, in 1982-1983, 1997-1998 and 2015-2016.
Below-normal rainfall
In Bukidnon, hundreds of hectares of rice fields in Valencia City, a major agricultural hub, have been affected by below-normal rainfall, prompting the National Irrigation Administration to implement scheduled water deliveries.
Valencia hosts over 10,000 ha of farms, consisting of 9,862 ha of irrigated land, 990 ha of rainfed farms, and 19 ha of upland fields dedicated to crops for local consumption.
Adonis Torres of the City Agriculture Office told the Inquirer on Thursday that the dry spell had severely impacted both rainfed and downstream agricultural areas.
At Sitio Bantal in Barangay Banlag, which covers over 300 ha of rainfed rice fields, about 80 percent of crops have struggled to transition from the vegetative to the reproductive stage due to a severe lack of water.
Torres noted that farmers had exhausted all options, including water pumps, as local water sources had dried up.
Farms near rivers still have some water supply, but officials warn that crops in these areas are not guaranteed to survive if the rivers dry up amid continuous below-normal rainfall