Mindanaotoday.com | Building business opportunities in agriculture
By: Maria Eloisa Akut
“ANG tableya ni mama, walay lasa (My mother’s tableya has no flavor).” So how can we market these? And the glaring financial records with 200 heads of free-range chickens eating sackful of feeds a day with no revenues at all!
The curiosity and the entrepreneurial mind of Julie Ann were triggered by the situations she witnessed on their farm, SiaKeAn’s Integrated Farm (stylized as SiaKeAn), which was owned and operated by her mother.
How come her mother continued to spend money with barely enough income to pay the laborers?
She took these situations as challenges in farming which she thought is a way to help her mother’s dream come true.
“My dream is for SiaKeAn’s Farm to be an exporter of cacao beans and other products, to be a prime chicken meat producer, and a vegetable product consolidator in the province,” this is what Julie Ann answered when asked about her current plan in life.
A strike of fate
An architect by profession, Julie Ann Alvarez is the second child of Garlan Alvarez who is a seafarer for decades, and Sagrada Alvarez, a city agriculturist.
She worked in a construction company for six years after graduating from Mapua University and after getting her license.
Managing a team of architects honed Julie Ann’s managerial skills to handle people and motivate them to work for the company’s goals.
Trapped in the construction site for months because of Covid-19 pandemic, Julie Ann was bored and granted to be allowed a Christmas vacation in their home in Jimenez, Misamis Occidental.
A strike of misfortune or fate, she became sick with pneumonia, thanks to her hardworking ways and the city lifestyle.
Hard work to a point of less or no sleep at all, she added.
“While recuperating, at first, I was just tending the flowers since I do not know anything about agriculture. But when I saw the Hubbard chicken weighing an average of 3 kilos and eating up my mama’s funds with no return, I suggested disposing of it. And voila! Everything of the 200 heads was sold in just two weeks!”
That made Julie look into all other records of the farm and realized that it is not gaining profit at all.
The biggest challenge
The challenge she was facing then was how to make the farm productive and generate income.
Seeing the cacao and tableya production as having the lowest revenue product but with high potential, Julie Ann tried to improve it by including fermentation of the cacao beans in the process.
“I experimented fermentation with the help of watching videos on YouTube, I can declare that I am a YouTube graduate. Then I attended the trainings organized by the ATI. Why not avail of all these free training programs?”
The product did improve and she was able to market online through a popular app.
With its new taste, the tableya made it through and online orders came pouring in.
And that’s when another challenge came. The market is not the problem now, it is the raw materials.
Cacao beans from the farm are not enough to produce more tableya, and Julie Ann had to make excuses with the buyers. She can’t supply them anymore.
She tried to diligently apply the organic concoctions to bring more fruits to the cacao trees but still, the fruits are not enough.
Linkage and coordination are the keys, Julie Ann thought. And she tried it with the cacao farmers in one of the meetings.
She offered them almost double the price of the cacao beans they are currently selling.
“Pero murag wala sila nituo sa ako. Tingali abi nila gabinuang man ning anak ni Diding (It seems they did not believe me. Maybe they thought this daughter of Diding is joking).”
This is one of the current experiences some young farmers are facing when dealing with the older and experienced ones in the field.
Such complexity did not stop Julie Ann to pursue her plan of getting big with cacao production.
She approached the cacao farmers in the neighborhood and started buying their beans at a higher price to boost their supply of raw materials.
With patience and perseverance, more meetings and linkages with farmers are coming up, and by now, surely, SiaKeAn’s tableya is back to online business.
A handful of DIYs
The selling of the 200 heads of Hubbard chicken in two weeks inspired Julie Ann to find time to watch for YouTube do-it-yourself videos of an egg incubator, to produce more chicks.
She was able to create a 360-capacity incubator and is now producing more chicks for meat production.
The mass production of chicken will fulfill her dream of becoming the supplier of organically grown chicken, which health-conscious customers are very much willing to patronize.
Again, a training on free-range chicken with ATI supplemented the knowledge of her limited intellectual resource in agriculture.
More to go
A lot has yet to be done on the farm according to Julie Ann.
The ongoing vegetable production with short-term crops provide sustainable income, but the dream of consolidating all the vegetable crops in the area for a greater market, and to help the vegetable farmers has just started in the neighborhood.
Hence, it has yet to grow big.
On the other hand, what gives a greater current income for SiaKeaAn’s Integrated Farm are the coconut trees.
The dwarf coco seedlings give the farm a weekly income of P7,000.
Added to it is the income from the coco sugar, the spicy coco vinegar, and the coco sauce out of the water from the matured coconuts.
All these are yet to be improved and made sustainable to achieve the dream of becoming a truly sustainable Learning Site for Agriculture (LSA).
Alongside these grappling for technical know-how in agriculture, Julie has to manage the paper works.
Her mother dreamed of the farm becoming an ATI-certified LSA, and a certified organic farm. These are already in place.
And by now, SiaKeAn’s Integrated Farm is already a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-certified for its spicy vinegar and cacao tableya, ready for display in malls and bigger markets.
She has to say
“The human brain is most powerful. What you think is what you will become. If you give, give your all. Don’t give up.”
“Be bold, be dynamic, be radical.” On this, Julie Ann expounded, that we have to fight for what we think is right, be strong on our stand, be open to suggestions, and adjust to changes in the environment.
These, she believes, are her guiding principles, which she now gives as a challenge to those who are yet to start a farming business.
Being one of the next-generation farmer-agripreneurs in the region is a great service to the agriculture sector.
And ATI-RTC X pens its hope for this young architect to be one of the great agribusiness women and prime movers in the field of agriculture.
For more of SiaKeAn’s Integrated Farm, visit their official Facebook account here: https://www.facebook.com/
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