A P10-million Knowledge Enterprise Incubation Center (KEICEN) and Virtual Centralized Laboratory (VCL) has been put up by the government in an aim to bolster food processing and value-adding in agricultural goods, help raise farmers' income, and spur countryside development.

The KEICEN-VCL is a center for technology entrepreneurial development and already has existing locators that are tapping the use of equipment and human resource capacity at its location at the APEC Center for Technology Exchange and Training for Small and Medium Enterprises (ACTETSME) in the University of the Philippines-Los Banos (UPLB).

The KEICEN is within an eight-hectare area that is being developed into a technology business incubation (TBI) facility within UPLB's Agro-Industrial Park. It will accommodate a total of 20 locators eyed to become successful micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) focused on producing processed food products, animal nutrition products, seeds, and other high-value agricultural goods.

"We see this as a source of revenue for biotechnology, so we're bent at making it successful," said UPLB Vice Chancellor Enrico Supangco in a TBI workshop.

Invent of Germany together with the Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology for Research and Development (PCASTRD) has initiated a capacity building workshop for the establishment of TBIs in the Philippines, recognizing TBIs' role for entrepreneurial development specially in technology-oriented industries.

UPLB's agro-industrial park is actually part of the Science and Technology Park with a total land area of 134.5 hectares including experimental fields and tissue culture and foods and feeds buildings that are already being used by locators.

The existing locators of the agro-industrial park are makapuno-maker Philhybrid which uses the facility's tissue culture laboratory, virgin coconut oil maker O' Mark, and trichoderma biofertilizer-maker Biospark Corp. UPLB has also allowed multinational seed firm Pioneer Hi Bred Philippines to lease an experimental field within the agro-industrial park and is charging the company lease at a commercial rate in order to raise revenue that will help maintain the entrepreneurial center.

Supangco said the virtual centralized laboratory enables small enterprises to use a set of common equipment that are normally expensive to buy if each company has to acquire them.

The VCL offers services on evaluation of feeds' potential value to animals; diagnostic services for animal health using diagnostic products; a veterinary molecular biology, immunology, virology, and vaccine research laboratories; diagnostic kits for pathogens; routine chemical analysis of plant tissues, soils, fertilizers, raw materials, and by-products of fermentation processes; analysis of pesticide products; and analysis for sample preparation of biological specimens using devices like transmission, scanning electron, and digital microscope.