"Natural" agriculture for poor farmers

We are indeed very sorry for having been long absent in this blog. Now, we have just new drive yet to galvanize however that organic, let’s say, farming has caught our attention. Perhaps it is for the presumably "cost-less" agricultural system that attracts us to adopt. Dearth has pushed us to take such innovative agriculture that still promises us energy to work even harder, unless such zero input agriculture is doomed to fail.

We would like to say we do not care that much with the so-called “organic” agriculture. Because, mostly we could not immediately reach that level of cleanliness from all toxic substances that have infected our land. As you know many chemical fertilizers and pesticides are indeed still around among local farmers in our neighborhood. We saw them using and we could not say and do anything yet, unless we have done and showed a difference to them.

Hopefully they would follow us.

But we have not even started yet actually. But we have been given a marvellous training the other weekend on, let’s say, “natural agriculture”. We learn again, including those already elderly among us, how to make compost out of our abundant hays, grasses, reeds, banana trunks, etc. Please see our humble image beside. We feel embarrassed actually that we only learn it now.

Thanks to our enthusiastic teacher-facilitator with his unflagging spirit. Mas Tanto of Yogyakarta has taught us valuable lessons about how to grow local, indigenous rice varieties that would be suitable with agriculture activities with very low, even almost nothing of external inputs like those chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.

We learn, in fact, that we have actually made our own land, not deliberately of course, much acidic so that different pests are attracted to approach and damage our plants. One of our teachers, who grows cacao, has found his hundreds of plants, died for leaf louses. He was helpless. It is a pity that we do not know about how to manage land into becoming neutral, not acid or basic, in addition to using our traditional kitchen’s ashes being sprayed on those miserable cacao plants.

Ever since, no one has taught us how to grow plants properly, even elementary principles, such as making compost. It is a pity. Indeed. Does it sound that we exaggerate? We actually just follow the way our parents or grand parents do.

The government appointed field officials for agriculture advice us, instead, to use those cursed chemical stuffs for agriculture, before they sell them to us and take our money. Is it not actually we do not have to pay? In fact, who would finance and “take benefit” from those big manufacturers like Pupuk Kujang, Pupuk Sriwijaya, ect., not to mention yet those imported.

Are we interested in paying them? No. No. Simply no way. Because even now they disguise such hegemony with offering subsidies of fertilizers. My goodness.