Bamboo As Super Crop – It’s Stronger Than Steel!


Above image comes from Civil Teacher – correct generalization, wrong grammar.

But that is getting ahead of my story.

In my high school years 1953 to 1957, bamboos growing at the back of our family house in Asingan, Pangasinan, were mute witnesses when I was disobeying my mother.

You see, my father Dionisio built his haystack close to the bamboos. Hay for the carabao. Ah, but the stack was a perfect hideaway for me to read clandestinely the monthly publications my mother Sixta did not approve – she said, “Gastos laeng dayta” (that’s just expense) – nonetheless, I loved to buy and secretly read sitting on the hay: Liwayway (Dawn) and Bannawag, the Ilocano version. Hay for the carabao pasturer. (Where did the money come from? Calesa savings daily from 4 trips to and from school in the town proper – I walked.) If you want to learn more, you have to do it yourself!

One fond memory of those bamboos is that in their thickets, when the rainy days came, on the ground grew uong mannagadu (multiplier mushrooms) – they were delicious!

Bamboos today: In a press release, chief of the Department of Agriculture, DA, Manong Willie talked policy to the Philippine Bamboo Industry Development Council, PBIDC, on Thursday, 06 February, during the Council meeting at the DA:

With bamboo as a high-value crop, we can undertake various interventions that include basic research, processing and value-adding, and budgetary support, complementing the programs and projects of the PBIDC.

The PBIDC is actually under the Department of Science & Technology, but Manong Willie knows the national value of bamboo, as he has a PhD in Horticulture from UP Los Baños.

He also invited private investors to set up their own tissue culture facilities and venture into bamboo production and processing.

Bamboo is a wonder crop we did not know. Kashyap Vyas of Interesting Engineering says bamboo is stronger than steel[1]! Compare tensile strengths: steel 23,000 ppsi, bamboo 28,000. And, “The great thing about bamboo is that we can utilize all the parts of the plant for a variety of purposes ranging from construction to deodorants and medicines.” And bamboo releases 30% more oxygen to the atmosphere than other plants. And, bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world.

The bamboo also teaches us a wise behavior. Bruce Lee said: “Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.” Unfortunately, our farm leaders refuse to bend with the winds of change. Manong Willie promotes optimization of operations; those leaders insist on their 50-year lack of wisdom –ownership of land, instead of consolidation of operations. The giant success of billion-peso Dalisay Rice with aggregating cultivation, not individualizing ownership, is a firm double-slap on their faces – ask pioneering spirits Patrick & Rachel Renucci of Alangalang, Leyte, who are more Filipino than many of us. (Read my essay, “How PH Rice Farmers Can Become World-Competitive. 1, Learn From Dalisay Rice![2]”)

If we do not bend with the wind, the wind will break us!@517





[2] https://iparadigmshifts.blogspot.com/2019/09/how-ph-rice-farmers-can-become-world.html

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