Land rehabilitation techniques of rice farmers in Pampanga (Philippines) after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption

One hundred farmers from lowland, lowland flood- prone and upland areas with varying severity of damage from the 14 randomly selected municipalities and cities in the province of Pampanga were surveyed on the techniques they used to rehabilitate their farms after the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Selected farmers were interviewed to validate further the results of the survey. Unlike other calamities with short term effects, the eruption that damaged farmlands did not have short term solutions. It is however, interesting to note that more than half of the respondents said they simply plowed the field, irrigated, then planted and followed the method of farming they had known before Mt. Pinatubo eruption. Scraping the sand and putting in more fertilizers and water were some techniques they resorted to cope with the changing composition of the soil. For those with severely damaged farms, the farmers resorted to quarrying where stones were removed manually and used "bulldozers" to flatten the land. Farmers resorted to their own ingenuity to revive their farmlands making the farmers more adapters than adoptors. When the soil became sandy due to lahar and ash, it required more farm inputs like fertilizers thereby increasing the cost of rice production thus, yield and income from rice farming have significantly decreased. The poor quality of rice has also been observed. The effect of Mount Pinatubo eruption on the farmers in Pampanga is not uniform but their farming practices, however, remained fairly uniform among all farmers regardless of the differences in severity of damage with this calamity. A more important and perennial concern of farmers is flooding, which was more aggravated by the lahar deposits that made river beds shallow.