Fruits of the Farm

I have been chilling out ( if I may use the jargon of the young) in an agro-forest on the nearby island garden city of Samal on weekends lately and the experience has left me both challenged and inspired. The durian trees that I planted a decade ago are now fruit bearing. Interspersed with avocado, lanzones and perennial trees such as Narra and Molave, the farm is a forest and an orchard overlooking Davao Gulf and the sunrise.


I have also reserved a part of the land exclusively for vegetables as this part of the island is now popularly becoming to be the vegetable capital of the island. Long ago, I found out that traditional or small farming per se is not lucrative here. For example, a kilo of camote costs P25 pesos and it takes this root crop about three months to harvest. Our farm hands planted sweet peas and the seller in the market earns more compared to our farmers who waited for three months for this vegetable to mature. We once planted mongoes in a hectare of land and after harvest, it occurred to me that it would have been more profitable if our enterprise was wholesale buying and selling mongoes in the market instead of planting. The lesson for me is that a farmer must engage in some kind of agribusiness if she wants to move up from subsistence farming to lucrative farming. I also found out in my travels in other parts of the world, that the reason why farmers are able to survive and are much better off or even rich there is because first world countries give farmers financial subsidy. So, for our millennium development goals to succeed in the next five years in the rural sector, our government needs to be serious about our agriculture and fisheries modernization program.

The face of the farmer is still traditionally that of a man, even if in actual practice, women are involved in planting, cultivating, harvesting, etc. The current programs of our government are trying to correct this. But, even if the women are now part of farm work, the men are still not helping with domestic housework. I am sure that this is also one of the reasons why many of our women have preferred that their housework get paid and highly in foreign lands. Our rural women are repudiating our culture of poverty in the rural areas and as well are escaping the non-egalitarian gender relations at home, while earning income abroad for the family. Meantime, the husbands are introduced to domestic work while their wives are economic refugees abroad.

A part of Samal City is devoted to rice farming but irrigation is unheard of in these parts. Mostly, farmers do not know that forests are related to water. We need to promote that a farm must have a forest in order to be sustainable. In one of the waterfalls, a developer cut some of the indigenous naturally occurring rain forest trees and replaced them with ornamental palm trees. Palm trees do not hold water and of course, the entrepreneur simply was not advised well.

If your parents have given you a piece of farm land by way of inheritance, will your spouse also own the fruits of the farm? The pre-nuptial agreement, if there is one, will govern. So, in the pre-nuptial agreement, you may stipulate that it be your exclusive property or community property or conjugally owned. If conjugally owned, yes, your spouse is co-owner of the fruits of the farm; but only the fruits are co-owned, the land is exclusive property of the inheriting spouse. Likewise, if there is no pre-nuptial agreement and you were married before the 1988 Family Code took effect, yes your spouse is co-owner of the fruits of the farm and this is under the regime of the conjugal partnership of gains. If you got married when the Family Code took effect already ( August 3, 1988) and there is no pre-nuptial agreement, the fruits of the farm are your exclusive property because the fruits and income are among those excluded from the community property of the spouses.