Ronnie Pacatang is a farmer who lives in a simple hut atop a hill on his rolling land in Barangay Cebulida in Laak, Compostela Valley.Three years ago, in an attempt to improve his farm’s productivity and his income, he began to apply new farming technologies that he learned from representatives of farm input firms whom he managed to contact. For instance, he started planting seeds of hybrid vegetables because these promise higher yields and are resistant to some pests and diseases.

At the trading center in Tagum, Davao del Norte, which is only 60 kilometers away, he saw that there was a big demand for ampalaya, so he bought seeds of a hybrid variety and planted them in a 3,000-square-meter portion of his land to coconuts, bananas and yellow corn.

Unfortunately for him, he did not get even a quarter of what he had expected to earn from his new crop in the more than two seasons that he grew hybrid ampalaya. The main reason was the variety that he planted is susceptible to the dreaded pamamarako, a virus disease that adversely affects the crop’s yield. When his ampalaya vines were about a meter long, many of these began to show signs of stunted growth, and leaves near the vine shoots, which noticeably grew very slowly, were small and malformed. When the infected vines bore fruit, these were also small and malformed.

“Not being able to improve my income frustrated me no end,” says Pacatang. “I wondered how I could recover from my failure. At least I knew in my heart that I could.” Before long, an agronomist of Allied Botanical Corporation heard about his plight, endured the trek through hilly terrain to visit him, and told him about the company’s hybrid varieties that it had developed with built-in resistance to several virus diseases and had successfully tested under various conditions throughout the country before making seeds of these available to farmers for commercial planting. The near-desperate farmer listened and agreed to try out ABC’s Condor Poseidon ampalaya variety as cooperator in a demo trial, with the cultivar that he had first planted and a new hybrid from the same seed brand to serve as test control varieties.

Under the ABC agronomist’s supervision, Pacatang sowed two seeds each of the three varieties in seedling trays that he had filled with fine topsoil mixed with compost. One week after sowing the seeds, he noticed that those of Condor Poseidon had a better germination rate than the other two varieties, and that the Poseidon seedlings showed much more vigor. When the seedlings had formed four to six true leaves, he thinned them to one plant per seedling pot. He watered the young plants every morning, seeing to it that the soil remained moist but not soaking wet.

Two weeks after sowing seeds, he transplanted the seedlings in beds that he had prepared beforehand. He saw to it that the seedlings’ root balls were intact, as bare-root plants will not survive, the agronomist told him. He spaced his planting holes at 75 cm apart and three meters distant between rows. He planted the Poseidon seedlings in 70 holes. Once every week, he drenched the holes with a mixture of 100 grams of 14-14-14 fertilizer and 16 liters of water. Later, he reduced the 14-14-14 portion by half and added 50g of 46-0-0 to the mixture.

In another two weeks, Pacatang saw that the Poseidon plants were so vigorous that they thickly blanketed his trellises. “The Poseidon vines’ vigorous growth made it very enjoyable to stay under them,” he says. “It was as if I had built a living room, which my hut did not have, to rest in during midday. More important, there was no sign at all of namamarako in the vines, thank God.”

Forty-six days after first sowing seeds, Pacatang began picking large and uniform-sized fruit from the Poseidon vines. For the two other varieties, he had to wait several days more before he could harvest fruits from the vines, many of which he had had to uproot and burn because of the namamarako infection. “Condor Poseidon also proved to be a more prolific bearer,” he says, “with nearly all of the fruits falling under the primero category, ensuring more earnings from this crop.”