Philippines: Benguet to offer organic strawberries by December

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Benguet has a Christmas gift for organic fruit lovers: luscious strawberries they can eat straight from the farm. Dr. Rogelio Colting, Benguet State University president, says that they would be offering organic strawberries in stores this December. “It will not just be any strawberry but the Sweet Charlie type which is very sweet and still very new here,” says Colting in a forum here on Thursday.

Sweet Charlie, which is larger than the usual varieties, was first grown in Argentina but is popular in Florida, he says. He says they have started to set up standards for international quality control for organic produce beginning with Robusta coffee and strawberries. He says production of organic strawberries will hinge on the water treatment plant which they are constructing with the help of the La Trinidad Water District.

The water will be used to irrigate the 10-hectare strawberry farm on the BSU campus in Km 6 in La Trinidad. Other prime consideration would be the red spider mites, which have been attacking the strawberries here for decades, Colting says. Jose Balaoing of the BSU’s department of soil science says that they are going to wage a mite-against-mite campaign in their organic strawberries.

They are rearing Amblyseius longispinosus, native predatory mites, for the control of spider mites in their laboratory. The predatory mites suck dry the spider mites. “The beauty of organic farming is that this can be possible. When pesticides are used, the predatory mites are killed,” Dalaoing says.

He says this was the experience in their use of diadegma wasps in the fight against the diamondback moth, which destroyed the cabbage and other vegetable conifers years ago. He says the massive use of pesticides then had been killing the wasps while the diamondback moth had become resistant to chemical inputs. Only when the farmers stopped using pesticides did the diadegma wasp become effective, he says.

The strawberry industry here used to be so dependent on pesticides that although tourists sometimes paid to pick strawberries, they are advised to wash them thoroughly before eating them. Colting says organic strawberries are not really expensive and could be cheaper in the long run.“The cost of production is in fact lower. It is only in labor that we spend more because organic farming means more manual work,” he says.

“Compost would be used to rehabilitate and enrich the soil. We have lots of that in the farm.” He said that they would not need greenhouses to produce organic strawberries. BSU and other commercial strawberry farms here cover the ground with plastic to prevent weeds from taking over the plots.

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