A Training That Travels: Organic Agriculture and Natural Farming Across Four Barangays in Del Carmen

From Bitoon to Halian, AGREA's three-day organic agriculture and natural farming visitation crossed four barangays in Del Carmen with MAFO and iLAJA.

The barangay that needs a boat

Halian sits off the coast of Del Carmen, on Siargao's western edge, across water that has to be crossed. It is a small island community of roughly eleven hundred people, most of them dependent on fishing, and until recently its power came from a community generator that ran for a few hours each evening.

Getting a training to Halian is not the same as getting a training to a barangay hall on the main road. It requires a boat, a schedule that depends on the weather, and materials that can be carried across water.

From 12 to 14 August 2026, the Training Visitation on Organic Agriculture and Natural Farming, titled Growing Together, Sustaining Tomorrow, moved through Bitoon, Sayak, Bagacay, and Halian in Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte. It was conducted with the Municipal Agriculture and Fisheries Office and iLAJA, under the Para sa Isla Project. People's Organizations and community members worked through composting, nursery management, organic concoction preparation, and natural farming methods, and explored how local resources can become sustainable livelihood products.

Four barangays in three days. The itinerary is the point.

What a visitation is, and why it differs from a training

A training usually convenes people. A visitation takes the training to them.

The distinction sounds administrative. It is not. Convening participants at a municipal centre selects for the people who can travel — who have the fare, the time, and the freedom from care responsibilities to spend a day away from home. Those are precisely the people who are already most connected to municipal services. The farmers and cooperative members who cannot make the trip are the ones a barangay-level visitation reaches.

There is a second difference. A session held in a barangay hall sits next to the farms it is discussing. Participants can walk to a compost heap, a nursery bed, or a problem plot. A facilitator can see the actual soil, the actual slope, the actual materials available, and adjust accordingly. A generic demonstration becomes a diagnosis.

Three days across four barangays is not an efficient way to deliver a curriculum. It is an effective way to reach the people the curriculum is for.

The four barangays

Del Carmen is made up of twenty barangays and had a population of 20,127 at the 2020 Census. The four on this route are among its smaller communities: Bitoon at 899 residents, Sayak at 876, and Bagacay at 667.

Bitoon is not starting from zero. The Women's Association of Barangay Bitoon began with about twenty mothers running a weekly savings scheme of fifty pesos each, and has grown to more than fifty members with a social fund, a community garden on borrowed land, and buyers among local resorts and businesses. When a training arrives in Bitoon, it arrives in a barangay where collective enterprise is already being practised.

Sayak and Bagacay are rural barangays of several hundred residents each, in a municipality whose economy rests on fishing, farming, and, increasingly, tourism. Bagacay appears in the municipality's own hazard mapping as an area with a significant share of its population exposed to high flood susceptibility and with drainage constraints — the kind of local condition that makes a conversation about soil, water, and organic matter immediately relevant rather than theoretical.

Halian is the outlier. Off-grid, boat-dependent, and fishing-based, it has been the site of renewable energy work through the EU-funded SMILE Project, which installed hybrid solar systems to provide round-the-clock power to off-grid island communities in Siargao and Dinagat. Reliable electricity changed what was possible on the island: cold storage, fish processing, and a sardine enterprise whose products have since reached buyers well beyond Siargao.

A visitation that reaches Halian is a visitation that has decided the island is not too inconvenient to include.

What was taught, and why each piece matters

Composting

Composting is the hinge between waste management and soil fertility. Organic material that would otherwise be burned or buried becomes an input that improves soil structure, water retention, and microbial activity.

The municipal context makes this concrete. Del Carmen has recorded a 25 percent reduction in unmanaged waste over recent years, and organic waste is the fraction that composting diverts most directly. For a farming household, the calculation is doubly favourable: less waste to dispose of, and less money spent on purchased inputs.

Nursery management

A nursery determines what a farmer can plant and when. Raising your own seedlings removes dependence on a supplier for the timing of a season, allows a failed sowing to be replaced, and makes it possible to experiment with a new crop without committing a field.

The technical requirements are modest: drainage, a growing medium, water, light, and attention. The constraint is usually management rather than equipment — watering through a dry spell, shading correctly, hardening seedlings before transplant, and keeping records of what worked.

Organic concoctions

Concoctions are fermented preparations made from farm materials — plant trimmings, overripe fruit, fish waste, ginger, garlic, chili — used as foliar feeds, soil drenches, and pest repellents.

Their appeal to a smallholder is economic. A farmer who buys synthetic inputs every season must find the cash before the harvest arrives. A farmer who can produce inputs from materials already on the farm has reduced that outlay and reduced exposure to price movements in external inputs.

JADAM

JADAM — from the Korean Jayeon-eul dalm-eun salamdeul, meaning "people who resemble nature" — is a system of organic farming established in 1991 in South Korea by Youngsang Cho, a chemist and horticulturist.

Its defining purpose is cost. Cho set out to create a method of organic farming that was "ultra low cost" by giving ordinary farmers the knowledge to make their own inputs, and the system is described as prioritising affordability so that organic production is within reach of anyone rather than dependent on purchased products.

The inputs have specific names and specific recipes, and the recipes are what make the cost claim credible.

JADAM Microbial Solution, or JMS, is brewed from boiled potatoes, sea salt, and leaf mould soil collected from local forest, culturing native microorganisms. Applied to soil, it adds microbial diversity rather than a purchased inoculant.

JADAM Liquid Fertilizer, or JLF, is made by fermenting plant materials — weeds, crop residue, vegetable trimmings — with water, often with fish scraps, rock dust, and sea salt added, and with biochar and citrus peel used to manage odour. In Philippine practice, a licensed agriculturist in Dipolog who has run the system since 2019 describes his liquid fertiliser as a blend of weeds, water, fish scraps, vegetable residue, rock dust, and sea salt, fermented under the sun.

JADAM Natural Pesticide, or JNP, is made from materials such as garlic, chili, and ginger, and is applied with a wetting agent to help it adhere to leaves.

JADAM Wetting Agent, or JWA, is a surfactant made from water, coconut oil, and potassium hydroxide — the same basic chemistry as soap — which allows sprays to spread and stick rather than bead and run off.

JADAM Sulfur, or JS, is a preparation of water, elemental sulfur, sodium hydroxide, sea salt, clay soil, and rock powder, used against pests such as aphids.

The most consequential difference between JADAM and many other organic systems is what it leaves out: molasses. Where conventional organic concoctions rely on molasses as a fermentation substrate, JADAM substitutes water and leaf mould. That single substitution removes the largest recurring purchase from the input budget, which is why the system can credibly call itself ultra-low-cost rather than merely low-cost.

JADAM's own materials also note that its pest control methods do not harm bees and butterflies, which matters on a farm where pollination is part of the yield.

None of this is exotic in the Philippines. The Agricultural Training Institute's Eastern Visayas centre has been running hands-on sessions in JADAM Liquid Solution and JADAM Organic Liquid Fertilizer alongside organic fertilizer preparation and biocomposting, and participants have described the methods as demonstrating that farming can be simple and low-cost. Del Carmen is not importing an untested foreign method. It is joining a practice that Filipino farmers and state extension agencies have already been working with.

From waste to product

The phrase in the announcement that deserves attention is the last one: exploring how local resources can become sustainable livelihood products.

This is where an organic agriculture training stops being about yield and becomes about income. Coconut husk that would be discarded becomes cocopeat or fibre. Agricultural waste that would be burned becomes compost. Surplus harvest becomes a processed product with a longer shelf life. Materials gathered from the roadside become an input that no longer has to be bought.

AGREA's own published description of Para sa Isla makes the same connection explicitly, describing the project as witnessing "the transformation of traditional practices in agriculture, fisheries, and local crafts into innovative circular economy solutions," with participants gaining "a deeper understanding of how waste can become value, how organic materials can be composted and returned to the soil, and how sustainable livelihoods can emerge from what was once discarded." The same description records the project's establishment of "community farms in every barangay that serve as living laboratories for regenerative practices."

A three-day visitation across four barangays is how that ambition gets a curriculum attached to it.

The partnership architecture

The activity sits inside a specific funding and governance arrangement, and it is worth setting out because it explains why a municipal agriculture office and a local NGO are delivering it together.

The Para sa Isla Project is implemented by AGREA Foundation with iLAJA and the Municipal Government of Del Carmen. It is carried out through the EU–Philippines Green Economy Partnership, funded by the European Union under its Global Gateway initiative and spearheaded by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

The partnership is a €60 million (approximately ₱3.67 billion) grant running from 2023 to 2028 in collaboration with national government, local government units, and the private sector. It is co-led by the Department of the Interior and Local Government, the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Department of Energy, and its four Specific Objectives are implemented by UNDP, Expertise France with the Global Green Growth Institute, and the International Finance Corporation.

Specific Objective 2 — Green LGUs — is the one that reaches Del Carmen. Its stated aim is to enhance circular economy practices by local government units in collaboration with the private sector and civil society organizations, with a focus on youth and gender equality. UNDP describes its portfolio as covering enabling policies, facilitating financing, advocacy and behavioural change, and enhancing knowledge and capacity among LGUs and stakeholders, with innovation, gender equality, disability and social inclusion, and a just transition at the centre of the approach.

The mechanism that funds civil society delivery is the Green LGUs Civil Society Grants for Circular Economy, through which AGREA and iLAJA work with people's organizations, cooperatives, and community groups.

This architecture matters for a practical reason. It means the training was not a one-off donation of expertise. It was delivered under a grant with reporting requirements, a defined objective, and a timeline to 2028 — the kind of arrangement that creates an obligation to follow up.

What the visitation does and does not establish

A three-day activity across four barangays is an input, and it should be described as one.

It does not establish that participants have built compost heaps, established nurseries, or produced JADAM inputs since August. It does not establish that any household has reduced its input costs or that any product has reached a buyer. It does not establish that the sessions were attended by the farmers who most needed them, or that the facilitators will return.

The specific content of each day — which barangay hosted which session, how many people attended, who facilitated which module, and whether materials were distributed — was not published in the announcement, and this article does not reconstruct it.

What the visitation does establish is that a curriculum in organic agriculture and natural farming reached four communities, one of them across water, in a municipality that has committed to a circular economy transition and has a grant structure obliging its partners to keep going. Those are conditions. They are not results.

What comes next

For the participants, the practical next steps are small and testable. Build one compost heap with materials already on the farm and turn it on a schedule. Raise one tray of seedlings rather than buying them. Make one batch of JADAM liquid fertiliser, label it with the date, and apply it to a small area before using it widely. Compare the result against an untreated strip.

For the barangays, the next step is whether any of this becomes collective — a shared nursery, a communal compost site, a group purchase of the few materials that must be bought.

For the Municipal Agriculture and Fisheries Office and iLAJA, the next step is the harder one: whether a visitation becomes a recurring practice with follow-up, or a memorable three days that leaves no trace in the following season.

A note of appreciation

To the Municipal Agriculture and Fisheries Office and iLAJA for carrying the sessions from barangay to barangay, and to the People's Organizations and community members in Bitoon, Sayak, Bagacay, and Halian who gave their time. Reaching Halian required a boat. That is not a detail to be glossed over; it is a decision about who counts.

To learn more about the Para sa Isla Project and AGREA Foundation's work on organic agriculture, natural farming, and circular economy livelihoods in Siargao, explore our official channels. Local government units and organizations interested in the Green LGUs programme can reach out through our contact page.