MANILA, Philippines -- We were invited to a dinner one evening attended by gentleman farmers. Many of them have been following our articles in the Bulletin. Their complaint was that we are not writing enough about failures in farming. Maybe, they said, we should write also about costly mistakes.

Well, we have written about farming mistakes in the past but we usually don’t mention the names of the fellows who committed them. Many of them don’t want to be known as failures.

One very costly mistake made by a retired executive who went into mango farming in Tarlac was planting his mango trees at five meters apart. Of course, the mistake was that he got the wrong consultant who must have intended to sell to him as many grafted seedlings as possible. His consultant was a nursery operator who actually didn’t know much about commercial mango production.

Eight years later, the retiree found out that his trees would not bear as many fruits as they should because they were overcrowded. He had to cut at least 600 of the 10-year-old trees and by his calculation, he had lost at least P2 million. That includes the cost of taking care of the 600 trees, the cost of the seedlings, the cost of cutting the trees and the cost of lost opportunity.

Another mango grower in Negros made the grave mistake of planting carabao mango on thousands of hectares. The last time we went to Negros in January, we witnessed the cutting of thousands of 15-year-old mango trees. Mango is simply not the right crop for a place that is too humid for this tropical fruit.

Another executive who went into mango farming in Isabela bought from us 250 grafted seedlings of Guimaras mango some years back. Not long after, he returned to buy more than a hundred grafted seedlings. Why? Half of the first batched perished because he made the mistake of putting fresh chicken manure in the planting holes. His cousin, he said, had offered his chicken manure for free. Our executive did not realize that unprocessed chicken manure is just too hot for young seedlings, or even mature ones.

We remember a farm we visited in San Ildefonso, Bulacan. The owner made the mistake of unloading a truckload of chicken manure around the base of a century-old mango tree. The heat of the fresh manure killed the old tree.

Applying the wrong chemical fertilizer can also be disastrous. Just like one fellow who applied urea on rambutan trees with small developing fruitlets. The result? The fruits dropped. That’s because urea is pure nitrogen which is for leaf production and not for fruit development.