How El Niño affected a family’s farm

OCCIDENTAL MINDORO, Philippines – Back in March 2018, Renal Advincula and his family faced a huge tragedy due to El Niño at their farm in Barangay Claudio Salgado, Sitio Pandan, Sablayan, Occidental Mindoro.

El Niño is a climate pattern caused by the interaction of the ocean and the atmosphere. The rise of oceanic temperature commonly happens in the Pacific Ocean and causes a decrease in the amount of precipitation. Temperatures may rise higher than usual, bringing warm and dry conditions. El Niño itself is part of natural climate variability, but its frequency, intensity and cycles are altered sometimes to the extreme, as climate change impacts the world. 

According to Renal and his wife Lily, the damage caused by the 2018 El Niño to their farm affected almost one hectare during that season. For Renal, that was the year with the most tremendous loss they have experienced in their farming lives.

“The water supply was not enough to sustain the whole farm,” Renal said. “The profit after the harvest was not enough to pay our debts,” Renal’s wife Lily added. “So, my husband borrowed money from the bank as capital for another cropping, and for us to maintain the farm, which is our primary source of income,” Lily said. 

The arid part of the soil spread until they were unable to make it cease because the water pump cannot provide more water for the whole area.

Due to climate change, Filipinos expect more disasters coming in. For this reason many farmers are conscious about their environment. When disasters happen, agriculture is one of the first industries affected with destruction. The only hope is for family farms to keep planting and growing crops.

“One of the serious problems we have is the need for water. Secondly, it’s the timing of the cropping season for the farmers, because planting is seasonal. It’s difficult to catch up with climate change because we cannot predict anymore when we will have rain and when there is drought,” Renal said.

“We are trying to save what has been burned by the heat in 2018, so we can have something to eat and make porridge with. We planted in December, then in February, we experienced constant heat, which lasted until March. This led to a situation where our rice field did not bear grains,” Lily recalled. 

“We harvested seven sacks during that season, but my husband only managed to save half of those after cleaning, since it was all burned by El Niño,” Lily added. 

The important challenge farmers like Renal and Lily face is producing sufficient food at competitive prices, so that the rest of the community has the capacity to feed itself. Farmers are thus seeking new strategies to manage climate change impacts on agriculture, food and nutrition.###

This article was written by Joana Marie T. Licop from Occidental Mindoro as a final requirement of AYEJ.org and the US Embassy’s “Green Beat Islas: An Online Environmental Journalism Training.”

Featured photo from Panay News