FOR HARD WORK, PAY-OFFS ARE WITHIN REACH

Juggling responsibilities in managing a buffalobased business and taking care of the family’s daily needs may seem to be hard-knock. But for Emily Velasco of Villa Joson, San Jose City, multitasking and yet being productive is possible as long as you put your heart into both.

A mother of two and an utter hard worker, Emily juggles her way as a housewife and as a carapreneur. This means engaging herself in dairying, milk collecting, and vermicomposting.

Emily recalled that it was when she was thinking of means to lighten the growing financial needs of her family that she came to know about the program of PCC. Luckily, she was selected as one of the beneficiaries of the PCC’s “25-Cow Dairy Buffalo Module”, which entrusted her with a dairy buffalo. She was then the lone female dairy farmer member of the “Simula ng Panibagong Bukas Producers Cooperative” (SIPBUPCO) in San Jose City.

From 2004 to 2007 she served as the secretary of the cooperative. She also became a member of the Board of Directors in 2012. She now works as a milk collector of SIPBU MPC, the name that SIPBUPCO acquired after turning into a multipurpose cooperative. Emily has now a total of five buffaloes. She also owns a piece of land where Napier grass, an excellent forage material, is grown and harvested.

“The buffaloes turn out to be a good investment with high return because they not only give me daily income but in times of desperate need, they provide an immediate solution to our financial problem, as they can be readily sold,” Emily shared.

She admitted that there were times when she had to sell several head of buffaloes to finance her son’s education. Those were the sacrifices that she had to make, she said. But now that her son is a full-fledged engineer, he promised Emily payback this time to help expand the dairy business.

Emily’s husband Luis, who has a full-time job, helps her in the production and management aspects. With their combined hard work, they earn a consistent daily income from the sales of milk.

The income, Emily proudly said, is enough to finance their family’s daily expenditures. In fact, she said, it is more than her husband’s take-home pay as a government employee.

“My husband often commends me for having the ability to milk our buffaloes better than he could,” Emily laughingly said.

Besides performing household chores and taking care of the animals, Emily is also into vermicomposting. She first heard of this technology when she joined the Farmer Livestock School on Dairy Buffalo Production (FLS-DBP) in 2016. FLS-DBP is a learning modality provided by PCC to farmers to give them technology options that are participants’ needs-specific.

In vermicomposting, Emily utilizes buffalo manure and earthworms (African Night Crawlers) to produce vermicompost which is an organic fertilizer. Every two months, she harvests 10 sacks from her vermi bed in her backyard and earns Php2,500.

Emily’s perseverance in doing one livelihood upon another brought her and her family valuable returns.

In 2017, PCC hailed Emily as “Modelong Juana sa  Kalabawan” for her outstanding perseverance and  dedication as a woman dairy-farmer.