DA projecting record palay output in ’15

The Department of Agriculture is aiming for the country’s palay output to reach 20.08 million tons in 2015, prospectively another record annual harvest.

Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala said in an interview this might be achieved mainly through a further push for the use of hybrid seeds.

“We hope we can achieve this also through expansion of areas, especially irrigated farms,” Alcala said.

Citing data on the National Irrigation Administration’s commitments for next year, the agriculture chief said the total area of rice farms was expected to expand by 52,000 hectares.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, harvest area planted to palay in 2014 reached 4.74 million hectares.

Also, Alcala said another big push for palay production was to bring up farm yield from an average of 3.89 metric tons per hectare in 2014 to 4.09 MT/ha.

“We hope to do this through the assistance of the adoption of hybrid seeds among irrigators’ associations,” he said.

In an earlier interview, Assistant Secretary Edilberto de Luna said the DA was aiming at a surge in the area of farms using high-yield technology in the production of rice.

De Luna said the DA’s goal was to see the harvest area for hybrid rice to reach 300,000 hectares nationwide in 2014 from some 200,000 hectares in 2013.

“We also want to scale that up to 500,000 hectares by next year,” de Luna said. “Our hope is that we can push this up to at least 800,000 hectares, which is just about one-fifth of total rice harvest area in an average year.”

De Luna, who is chief of the government’s national rice program, explained that this campaign also involves related support such as fertilizer distribution and irrigation services.

“To achieve that, we want to optimize the use of elevated areas (that are usually not covered by irrigation networks),” he added.

Earlier, de Luna said the DA was making efforts to top last year’s record palay harvest of 18.44 million tons to 19.07 million tons this year.

The respective goals for 2015 and 2016 are set at 20.09 million tons and 20.52 million tons.