Being a Farmer

30 Kilos of Ginger or Luya Ready to be planted
The Price of Ginger/Luya here in Lipa City is 8/kilo at the farm and 15/kilo at the market

To be honest, I don't really know if I should call myself a Filipino farmer/magsasaka. I don't know much about the etymology of "magsasaka" but I'm guessing it has to do with working on another person's farm - that, I haven't done. I'm not so sure about the proper definition.

But if the definition of a farmer is someone who plants stuff and harvests them, then in a small sense I am a farmer. In my stay here, I've managed to plant

• 200 Senorita banana trees - of which only 2 are alive right now...
• 50 ginger
• Dug through the hard ground about 6 feet deep cut a hectare of grass by now.

So my next agricultural business experiment would be to plant some Papaya trees and ginger again. 

The price of ginger has dropped precipitously even though whenever typhoon season starts, the prices of vegetables should skyrocket. Some large and new farm must have flooded the market with ginger. It used to be priced above 100 Pesos a kilo and above, but now, it's down to 8 Pesos (farm) and 15 Pesos (market bagsakan). On the up side, my starting capital need not be that high. 

Thanks to Ann Smarty's MyBlogGuest contest, I now have some capital - about $300. Enough to buy me some gasoline for the grass cutter, hire a couple of farm workers to help with the planting and to buy additional seeds to plant. 

Right now, we have 30 kilos of ginger in our inventory ready to be planted. The ground though needs to be cleaned before we could plant. Otherwise, it would be hard to find the ginger plant amidst all the weeds.

Tabungi ang retrato

I'm off to cut the remainder of the grass. Then next week, it would be tilling and digging time.

Right on schedule.

Not bad if you take a look at how it used to look like: