My Passion, My Life
WHY I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT NATURAL ORGANIC FARMING
PREAMBLE
“I’ll answer the question straight” Low said.
1st Reason: This is actually a family legacy.
My late father was my single greatest influence.
2nd Reason: I oppose using poisons to grow food. Shouldn’t
everybody?
3rd Reason: I care for the environment because it is the foundation
of YOUR SURVIVAL AND MINE; and
4th Reason: Nutritious food is health. Health is our best personal
asset.
PATERNAL MENTOR
My late father sold herbal tea for a living. Naturally, he was interested in the basics of health. He always told me this: Medicine treats symptoms, not the root cause of ill health. He didn’t trust commercial farmers to deliver that nutritious, health producing food.
So, he tilled our half-acre garden at the back of our house in Penampang and grew all kinds of vegetables of his own – Choi Sam, Kai Lan, Cucumbers, Egg Plants, Kang Kong, Bitter Gourd etc. and reared a few free ranch chickens.
So, I grew up with natural organic gardening and the reason for it. When my father died, I decided herbal tea wasn’t my cup of tea.
Organic farming was my real passion. I had in mind temperate organic vegetables because it seems they help cancer patients more.
DOUBLE FAILURE
I headed for Kundasang – Sabah’s well-known temperate vegetable belt. I opened my first farm there. But pesticide farms surrounded me. When they sprayed, all pests ran to my farm and wiped out my crops.
So I learnt my first lesson – stay away from pesticide farms. Keep your distance. I moved back 20 kilometres to Kampung Tomis. But I failed again because of old ideas. I continued to apply my father’s garden techniques.
In a small garden, like the one in our house, you can remove the worms and pests with your hand and use small amount of dung from a few chickens to great manuring effect. But that’s not practical in a larger commercial farm.
That was 17 years ago. The double failure was a big blow. I became a butt of jokes to my friends, even my family.
ORGANIC LESSON FROM SABAH’S RAINFORESTS
Dejected but not giving up, I retreated to Sabah’s primary rainforests to learn from Mother Nature. There, I saw huge trees, lush and vigorous greens, with practically zero pest problems.
All that is achieved without a pinch of chemical fertilizers, certainly not a drop of pesticides, or fungicides or growth hormones but the forest floors teem with organic wastes, insects and loose soils.
It forces you to ask the right question: What is nature’s ultimate secret in supporting forever such a complex web of super-healthy vegetative growth?
If you can unlock the secret, you have found the answer to organic farming.
The answer is in the food web, which has been self-regenerating and self-regenerating in a state of perfect balance, through a cycle of birth, growth, death and decay.
It recycles its own wastes to perfection through its legions of recycling specialists people despise and want to kill, such as centipedes and unseen microbes, to name just sparingly.
So, who says Sabah doesn’t have local, indigenous Effective Microbes (EM) of its own that are part of the local ecosystem, which have done an effective job for millions of years working in harmony.
This is one reason why I remain opposed to importing and introducing alien Effective Microbes from friendly countries like Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Japan or the US for composting and put that into our soil because they may turn out to be terrible invaders like the Australian hailed acacia, against which the local ecosystem is defenseless and spreading out of control.
Predator and prey relationships kept things stable and in equilibrium. Any time a species tries to reproduce out of control, it faces certain opposition from predators. That’s nature’s defense against chaos and disorders.
Spiders, birds, dragonflies, prey on insects and scorpions eat spiders etc to maintain functions and keep the systems in working order.
Armed with enlightened insights from nature, I went back to Kampung Tomis but at a different spot and it worked this time. But a major repair work on the Ranau Highway sent torrents of mud down and virtually buried the farm. So, another major setback. This is why I moved to Bundu Tuhan three years ago.
A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
Despite that, I’ve never lost faith in natural organic farming. Having seen, for instance, how black ants attack and kill worms that eat my Kai Lan, or a dragonfly chase mosquitoes and flies, how can a natural organic farmer see these things and not actively support biodiversity conservation which means three thing – genetic, species and ecosystem conservation.
So, it was actually the natural processes at work in Sabah’s jungles, which inspired my uncompromising farming principle – no chemical fertilizers, no herbicides, no fungicides, no pesticides, ants, wasps etc to take out the pests for me, not pesticides.
They are like us. To attract them to come and work for you, you need to look after their survival too, which means providing shelter, food, water etc, in or around your farm.
Birds need trees to perch, roost and nest. Insects live in bushes, grasslands, while voracious insect eaters like dragonflies need clean rivers and ponds to breed. Their larvae live in water for years before changing into a flyer.
In short, a true organic farmer is necessarily a protector and lover of the natural environment. This is why I stress to people I do Natural Organic Farming. It’s more than just making and using organic composts.
HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT = HUMAN SURVIVAL
It is very important that organic farming demonstrates an understanding of man’s complete dependence on a healthy, productive environment for survival by not destroying the adjacent forests, hills and water bodies as agriculture in general do.
This is very important because I believe that the most powerful civilization can collapse when the environment is allowed to deteriorate.
OF POROUS SOIL, FERTILE SOIL AND HUMAN HEALTH
Organic minerals are one of the six major classes if nutrients – the others are water, fats, vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. The human body can’t use inorganic minerals.
We depend absolutely on plants to mine large numbers of inorganic minerals and trace elements from the soil and convert them into their organic forms, which the body can assimilate.
Plant roots do that critical mineral mining job for us; on condition that the soil is fertile and that it is porous, not compacted, so that the roots can move and probe at will, to find the necessary minerals and trace elements whenever they need them. This is one reason why I think organic vegetables are more nutritionally balanced.
This is why organic composts are central because it feeds the good microbes, which in turn multiply, move and make the soil both fertile and porous.
In fact, porous soil is so important for water conservation that the first responsibility of a forester is to maintain porous soil, a book somewhere says. And I believe that delivering nutritious food to consumers is the responsibility of farmers.
If I go into organic farming purely to extract your money, by hook or by crook, my conscience bothers me. I am our not only in pursuit of health and liberty from sickness, but in pursuit of happiness.
What makes me happy is standing firm in my unwavering purpose in life to produce nutritious food first, care about consumers’ health, although it is important that I make some money to carry on.
This is why I agree with Gurmit Singh that organic farming is not for everybody. It is for people who cherish values and principles. Unless you have those basic character traits, you can resort to easy ways out when problems come.
CLIMATE CHANGE CAN STILL BEAT ME
I regret to say, the weather of late, was not on our side, over the last six months, in Bundu Tuhan, where I farmed. The area hardly saw sunlight between September 2003 to February 2004 because of bigger clouds, longer clouds and persistent thick mists.
Plants just didn’t grow because there was little photosynthesis. Pests flourished but their predators such as birds were nowhere to be seen. To make things impossible, strong winds knocked down standing crops, heavy rain rotted others and this extreme weather went on for months!!!
If productivity is fundamental to good economics, then our productivity suffered a hard knock. Honestly, in all the 12 years of organic farming at the foot of Mt. Kinabalu over the last 12 years, I had never seen such extreme weather.
To you, climate change may not be real, but my terrible experience with the devastating impact of extreme weather in Bundu Tuhan, convinced me Planet Earth’s climate had deteriorated and that we are beginning to pay a heavy price for fooling around with the environment.
Let us not accuse America for pumping global warming gas. Areas around Mt. Kinabalu are a burning hell every dry season! What I am telling you is hard information from the field. Treat me as your eye and your ear.
My point is we must not treat environmental deterioration lightly any longer because the destruction is already very real. I am not sure whether this is a one-off problem or whether it will regularly repeats itself in the future. But if farmers begin to lose faith in the weather, I wonder what the future of natural organic farming will be. Or, how it may affect the vowed Malaysian objective under the Third Agricultural Policy for self-sufficiency in food. Ends.