Organic garden project makes use of military camps, supplies food to soldiers and families

IF Lt. Gen. Gregorio Pio P. Catapang would have his way, all 15 military camps under his command would have farms.

Catapang, commander of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’s Northern Luzon Command (Nolcom), would have camps planted with various vegetables and fruits, with ponds teeming with tilapia, and goats and cattle grazing the wide-open fields.

If only each camp would be planted with organic fruits, vegetables and herbs, and with each camp contributing 10,000 hectares each to the organic-farming project, at least 150,000 hectares of military land would become production centers of organic vegetables, herbs, fish, fruits, and goats and cattle, he said.

After all, Catapang added, the “Hardin ng Lunas” currently operating in three of his camps supply 60 percent of the food requirements of his soldiers.

On February 10, together with the Tarlac Heritage Foundation, Camp O’Donnell in Capas, Tarlac, celebrated their second “Harvest Festival.”

Also inaugurated that day was a bahay kubo, symbolic of the Filipino farmer’s rest hut in the middle of the field, and a kiosk where the Hardin’s vegetable and fruit harvests were displayed and sold to the public.

The camp’s Hardin is an ongoing project of Camp O’Donnell’s Mechanized Infantry Division, initially headed by retiring Maj. Gen. Nicanor E. Dolojan.

Dolojan said his soldiers spend their spare time tending the gardens while performing their training activities to defend the country.

The Tarlac Heritage Foundation, under Dr. Isabel Cojuangco Suntay, launched the organic garden in the camp in September last year. It is the third showcase garden under the foundation’s project showcasing organic planting, and animal and fish raising in the province of Tarlac.

The first farm is found in Barangay Camangaan East in Moncada, Tarlac, while the second is at Camp General Servillano Aquino in Barangay San Miguel, Tarlac City.

Suntay said the Hardin project encourages military personnel and civilian employees to plant and tend organic vegetables, fruits and medicinal herbs in military camps, which has become a source of food and livelihood for the soldiers and their families.

On November 26, 2013, the foundation and Nolcom’s Mechanized Infantry Division shared the bounty of their harvest with residents of several barangays in Tarlac in a pre-Christmas celebration.

Aside from performing to the delight of the local villagers, the soldiers gave away the fruits of their gardens. The food bags contained tomatoes, pechay (Chinese cabbage), eggplants, okra (gumbo), brown rice, locally called  pinawa, and several live tilapia (cichlid fish).

Suntay said President Aquino, her second-degree cousin, launched the first Hardin on December 1, 2012, in Camiling, Tarlac, with the first Hardin opening on July 1, 2013 at Camp Gen. Servillano A. Aquino on a 2-hectare fairway lot. The Hardin was planted with 75,038 vegetable seedlings consisting of 56 varieties, 123 fruit trees, 150 ylang-ylang (Cananga odorata) trees and 600 tilapia fingerlings.

Several typhoons that passed through Central Luzon the past two years flooded the gardens and emptied the camps’ fishponds, but the foundation and the soldiers persisted.  The three Hardins were replanted with fruits and vegetable seedlings, and the ponds restocked with tilapia fingerlings.

Catapang may still get his wish of gardens teeming with organic plants and ponds full of tilapia.