Agrinurture Inc. plans to jump-start this year its corn plantation as it intends to plant 20,000 hectares of land in Bansalan, Davao del Sur.
Antonio Tiu, Agrinurture chairman, said the company is looking at a capital expenditure of P2.6 billion, of which P2 billion will be tapped through a loan from the Development Bank of the Philippines to jump-start the project.
The Davao del Sur site is eyed to generate about 200,000 metric tons (MT) of corn a year which Agrinurture will use for its rice-corn product.
Tiu, however, said the company is looking at an annual one million MT output, with a number of sites up for planting in the next three years.
“My main focus right now is to grow Agrinurture’s revenue, to improve the profitability, to bring in new projects, and to be a major participant in solving the food security issues of the country,” Tiu said.
He said Agrinurture’s initiative will lessen the country’s dependence on imported rice and could potentially bring back the old practice of Filipinos having corn-rice as their staple.
“We tend to import rice because it is readily-available in the global market. However, as the pandemic has shown us, there are times when you cannot ensure food security even if you have money,” Tiu noted.
He added planting corn in the Philippine is more cost-effective given the limited source for freshwater irrigation, as a rice paddy takes more than 3,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice.
“For corn, it is less than 1,900 liters, sometimes 800 liters, so it’s less than a third or even one fourth of the water footprint of rice. Corn is thus more suitable for the Philippine set-up,” Tiu said.
Filipinos in Visayas and Mindanao used to eat corn as a staple but have been converted to rice eaters in recent decades, he noted.
“We will be using hybrid corn seeds and we’ll be using modern technology so we can produce about 10 to 15 MT per hectare per year or a total of 200,000 to 300,000 tons of corn per year,” he added.
