BY LEANDER C. DOMINGO
PUDTOL, Apayao—More women in Northern Luzon have engaged in livestock farming.
Lorie Gatiw-an, Dur-as Farmer’s Association (DFA) member in Barangay Aga in this town, recently sold her four farm-raised bucks for P25,500, enabling her to buy rice and other basic needs for her family.
She said the goats were offspring of the does provided by the Department of Agriculture (DA) in the Cordillera Administrative Region to their association under the Special Area for Agricultural Development (SAAD) program in 2017.
The SAAD program, coined after the Visayan word “saad,” which means promise, was a locally funded program of the DA intended to help alleviate poverty among the marginalized in the agriculture and fisheries sectors.
It was part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s goal of increasing food production and reducing poverty in the Philippines. Through the SAAD program, a total of 30 priority provinces, including the province of Apayao, with a high poverty incidence rate among families were assisted in both agriculture and fisheries since 2017.
In this town, the SAAD program under the goat production project with funding of P1,040,000 had provided the DFA 21 does worth P420,000 and two housing barns worth P620,000.
“Each of the members of the DFA was given two goats. But I also purchased a buck worth P5,500 in 2018 to improve the productivity of my goat breeding stock so that I raised seven heads, five bucks and two does from 2018 to 2020,” Gatiw-an said.
She added that she was able to share a buck and a doe with the next-in-line beneficiary.
“This is a project with a good source of income because I was able to buy 6 cavans or 300 kilos of rice for my family’s consumption and other basic needs,” Gatiw-an said, adding she is again preparing her remaining does to raise more goats.