The National Irrigation Administration Region 7 celebrated last week its second year anniversary highlighted by its performance of steadily increasing irrigated areas and commendation as among the top 5 most profitable NIA regional operations nationwide. NIA 7 Regional Director Engr. Modesto Membreve proudly announced before the regional office personnel during their simple salo-salo that the performance was attributed to the passion of his men to work to achieve their targets and the positive response of the Boholano farmers of the service rendered to them by his office. In a performance matrix, Membreve showed that in 2008 there were 19,024 hectares serviced by his office. In 2009 it increased to 21,866 hectares and last year it grew to 22,098. Translated to harvest, it is estimated that in 2008 there was a total of 6,087,680 cavans harvested at a conservative estimate of only 160 cavans per hectare with two croppings. In 2009 under the same standard of computation Bohol had a total harvest of 6,997,120 cavans of the areas serviced by NIA. By 2010 a total of 7,071,360 cavans were harvested.

As can be gleaned by the report of Engr. Membreve, it is clear that our road to a better rice self-sufficiency situation is improving. In fact, Membreve was confident that for this year we will increase our harvest tremendously specially with the introduction of rattooning by 2 nd District Congressman Erico B. Aumentado which was implemented initially to 500 hectares. The rattooning system allows for a third cropping where ordinarily our farmers only have two cropping seasons. As a support to this project, Cong. Aumentado gave a sack of urea to the farmers of the initial 500 hectares to goad them into fully implementing rattooning. It may be recalled that Cong. Aumentado sliced part of his PDAF to support his goal to make the second district in particular and the province of Bohol in general as the rice granary of Central Visayas by giving a sack of urea to those who will implement rattooning in areas serviced by NIA. This support is expected to add substantial increment not only to our harvests but also to the income of our farmers.