Digos City, PH – Food Always In The Home (FAITH) organic gardening knowledge helps provide jobs – Mar 2024
This letter from Rey Diez, who started Sunrise shop near Digos City, Philippines by teaching organic vegetable growing techniques of the Food Always In The Home (FAITH) garden system, talks about the impact of this knowledge that originated in the Philippines.
Sunrise Shop and its team is living Better Lives purpose by means of example. Sunrise believes in the Better Lives purpose to assist families so their children have the opportunity to grow up healthy, educated and able to support a happy family of their own.
Pany my second brother is part of the Sunrise Shop team that assists families to grow vegetables. Pany is mentor in charge, and at the same time he is a gardener and farmer on his own farm. Pany is adapting the knowledge learned from FAITH garden practices to improve his garden. The FAITH garden system taught him to be wise by adapting the multi-cropping system in to his large scale garden. What is multi-cropping and how does it help Pany and the community?
Multi-cropping is planting two or even more kinds of crops in the same field. It helps Pany achieve prosperity by improving his productivity, income predictability and food security. This method reduces the risk of crop failure and also maximizes land productivity, as different crops can utilize different resources more efficiently resulting in higher yields and a more sustainable and prosperous farm. He has been very succesfull on adapting this method on his farm, where he grows chili, beans and corn.
Pany is also a true role model and good mentor for the youth around our village. He is not only a mentor and gardener, but has also provided jobs for the out of school youth in the village. Sunrise team believe that by providing individuals with work it gives them a sense of purpose. When an individual has work, they have the capacity to contribute positively to their community, rather than relying on the community to support them.
Pany’s challenge is that the young people have lost their interest in farming because they do not see big opportunity in it, and prefer to leave their community to go to city to look for a job and earn more money. Despite this, his dream is still to encourage young people to stay in school and also learn farming. He wants his children to be educated and able to support a happy family of their own by farming.
Pany says, “thank you to Better Lives for caring, even though you do not know us personally. I feel indebted to you because this project could not have been so successful without your involvement.”
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