Healthy Farms for Healthy Foods

Above, you are looking at the image that accompanies the article “Technology And Fresh Thinking Will Help Us Reinvent Teamwork [1] ” by ANN (Author Not Named, 22 October 2020, Wired.co.uk ). ANN says the article was written “in partnership with Dell Technologies and Intel.” Now I say Dell and Intel understand little creative team thinking!  (Teamwork image [2] from CanStockPhoto ) Today, workers in the office have become workers scattered here and there, with interactions now virtual. Given the individual isolation of team members, ANN asks how can the team be more cohesive and effective: “Can teamwork and team culture be preserved, and even reinvented, in the midst of the coronavirus emergency?” Good question! “Fresh thinking” in the title refers mainly to brainstorming. “Red tape and paperwork are being slashed to the minimum and year-long problems solved swiftly out of sheer necessity,” ANN says. Now, Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of AI company Affective, asks, “How can some e...

Above, a Facebook sharing by a common friend, Nestor Maniebo Pestelos: “Very Good Research Result Gone To Waste! – zac b. sarian.” (Research image from [1]   Victoria University of Wellington ) Zac Sarian sees failure on the part of the management of Mariano Marcos State University, MMSU, the institution that sponsored the sweet potato research – MMSU did not pursue the sweet results of a sweet potato study to its sweet conclusion: Make the sweet potato results known to farmers so that they can profit from them – and the public can savor that success. Based on personal knowledge, I say: “Zac, not only MMSU failed to bring the good news from research to farmers in this regard – among the SCUs, the biggest failure is UP Los Baños!” A failure of leadership? No, it has been an institutional design failure. On record, UP Los Baños has 3 major roles: Instruction, Research, Extension . The results of Good Research are supposed to be Extended to the people. As our Secretary of Agricul...

Personally, as a crusading communicator in agriculture, I want to congratulate the Mina Municipal Federation of Farmers Association, MMFFA , in Iloilo Province, for having advanced farm mechanization starting 06 May 2010 when it was formed (Sheila Mae H Toreno, 07 November 2020, “Reaping The Gains Of Mechanized Farming,” Facebook sharing). Miss Sheila says the MMFFA since the beginning has sought to “shift the traditional farmers into a highly mechanized rice farming community, driven to optimize every government aid to counter the drawbacks present in the sector.” She says: They sought support from the Department of Agriculture (DA) to ease their burdens caused by the spiking prices of inputs, high labor costs, changing climate, and postharvest losses leading to low income of farmers. Registered with the Department of Labor and Employment, DOLE, on 10 September 2013, the MMFFA covers all 22 barangay associations in Mina with 989 initlal farmer members whose average landholding was l...

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery” – Mark Van Doren, American poet, writer & critic [1] . (art ima ge [2] f rom The Quotable Quote ) This Teacher & Writer agrees! I am a graduate of a BS Agriculture degree major in Ag Education, obtained from the University of the Philippines ’ College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, in 1965, or 55 years ago. I passed the very first Teacher’s Exam given in the Philippines the year before that, with a grade of 80.6%, not bad for a first-timer and without attending any review classes whatsoever, not even reviewing by oneself. Mostly an exam, Civil Service or not, is recall – mechanical, repetitive, and boring. The right way to teach never changed. Teaching is Teaching, whether you are in Agriculture, Dancing, Forestry, Kinetics, Music, Ophthalmology, Painting, Research, Ultra Numbers (I have just invented this one), Watershed, or Zamboanga. I Teacher say that in Science or in Art, the best learning is how you discover...

With my browser Vivaldi , on a Facebook page I captured the above image of a visual cum intellectual cum digital display by 360 PH: Virtual Tours Philippines, and you can download the paper, which I just did. Before that, I moved my mouse in a 360-degree turn left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and bottom to top – I fell in love with it! This is a virtual tug of the heart and mind – which every webinar should go after. There have been no invigorating download offers this year. Now, I am a science journalist, and I could have written on any presentation if I had gotten hold of a copy of the pertinent digital file. The way I look at it, with the above show of a virtual exhibit, 360 PH has changed the history of webinars in at least 2 ways: 1.     Can read & may attend – Download a paper and read it at leisure. We may thus be convinced to attend. 2.    Can read & may write – 360 PH has now changed the rules of the game and made available the papers o...

Surprise! A Manila paper today, 08 November 2020, comes out with a feature story by Carla Bianca Ravanes-Higham about my son Jomar Reynoso Hilario (shown above with his mother Amparo sharing dessert): “Jomar Hilario Helps Filipinos Adapt To The New World Of Work [1] ” (08 November 2020, Manila Times ). It’s 0930 hours Sunday as I write, and I’m eating a bar of Cloud9 doing this, thinking and typing at the same time. in my own room . Separately, Son works from home, WFH; Father works for whom, W4W. Jomar’s WFH is for Filipinos who work for others here and/or Internet-miles abroad; my W4W is for Filipinos who work for farmers anywhere in the Philippines. Jomar Hilario, Work From Home (WFH) Working from home, WFH, for more than 10 years now, Jomar is a Virtual Career adviser to would-be Virtual Assistants, VAs. Jomar looks for any number of people to mentor as VAs working for individuals or institutions away from home, producing daily, weekly, or monthly outputs for offices. Miss ...

The background of the image above says:  SRO Seminar Series – Research Management & Institution Building. SRO is Santiago Rigonan Obien, in barong, right, founding Executive Director of the Philippine Rice Research Institute, PhilRice, with headquarters in the Science City of Muñoz, where the seminar series is held during the anniversary celebration of PhilRice on the 5 th of November. Main photo was taken during this year’s 35 th celebration. Rene is Tito Nato-Kuya Rene; his own effusive Facebook sharing is titled “33 Years of Partnership” – which means Rene came into the lives of SRO and PhilRice 2 years after PhilRice was created in 1985 by Executive Order of President Ferdinand Marcos. Rene had a full-blown (and lucrative) appointment as architect with “a big firm working for projects in China” and he was “the CEO’s ‘anointed’.” Then SRO called, meaning his country called for him – he answered the call. He does not say so, but Rene must have been the one who designed ...