Journalists, why not celebrate November as the starting month dedicating yourselves to spreading on Earth the good you can do via Organic Agriculture? Then you will deserve all the annual Binhi Awards in the world!
(awards image[1] from BusinessMirror, “organic” image[2] from Dreamstime)
Extra-excited today, Tuesday, 02 November 2021, learning that November was declared 6 years ago, 2015, by President Benigno Aquino Jr as “Organic Agriculture Month” via Presidential Proclamation 1030. Since reading about trash farming about 55 years ago, in the books of Edward H Faulkner, Plowman’s Folly(1943) and Soil Development (1952), I have been convinced that organic agriculture or organic farming (either of which is the generic term), is both farmer-smart and field-smart, or cultivator-smart and climate-smart.
For your information, I am a founding member of the Philippine Agricultural Journalists (PAJ). I was the one who came up with the concept & name of the PAJ’s Binhi Awards almost 43 years ago – while I began founding and being Editor In Chief of 3 publications of the Forest Research Institute (FORI): FORI’s monthly Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly popular magazine Habitat.
And yes, once a writer, always a writer – with the qualification that I was once a mechanical writer (typewriter user) and now a digital writer (laptop user).
Now then, as a wholehearted warrior writer for agriculture in the last 46 years, a virtual village voice in the last 21 years, I have decided to dedicate the rest of my life – turned 81 on 17-09-2021, thank God – to mentoring willing members of the PAJ as well as volunteers from outside the group, probably from the state colleges & universities (SCUs) – to write to communicate knowledge in modern agriculture, specifically organic farming. I call this journalism project Appropriate Manuscripts to Mobilize Organic Knowledge in Agriculture (AMMOKA).
Here’s “Usapang Sakahan” (Farm Talks): With the leaders of the PAJ signing after much consultation, we will submit a full-pledged proposal to San Miguel Corporation, or another patron, to support Project AMMOKA for P5 Million for the following expenses: 50 laptops (for journalists-volunteers being mentored, and aggie knowledge gatherers in SCUs), 50 portable Internet routers, 50 printers, 50 digital cameras; 5 computer programmers for building user-friendly digital AMMOKA Knowledge Bank (Englishfirst, Tagalog later); mentoring expenses; printing copies of monthly magazine AMMOKA (free to PAJ members and sold to the public), and project management & virtual office costs.
Face-to-face meetings will be welcome but not necessary. I will mentor the journalists-volunteers anywhere they are anytime virtually.
For those who do not know Frank A Hilario: I am a UP Los Baños graduate, self-taught digital writer. Since 2000 an implausible indefatigable blogger, here’s a short “About Me” – https://communicationfordevelopmentphcomdev.blogspot.com.
Finally, I am enjoining the PAJ to see to it that its members, and outside volunteers, conduct themselves as conscientious communicators of knowledge in organic agriculture. Particularly, I note, according to its website:
PAJ has evolved from a social club mainly for the welfare of its members into an organization now imbued with social goals and responsibilities.
Attaboys, PAJ!@517
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