First on our agenda was to visit Rumandan Farms. It is literally a visit, because it is breeze dealing with this grower. From owner Gene, assistant Karen to farm manager Luis, it had always been easy transactions. Luis should find raising Sunshines "sisiw"....he was a Darag Coordinator for PCARRD for quite sometime and dealt with Doc Synan in the studies. He still maintained his Darag production, but as he says, the commercial quantity to serve consumers is still far, plus the fact that you can't predict harvest.
Until now, he gets and shares pointers with Doc Synan (grab a copy of Agriculture Magazine of Manila Bulletin for August 2008), making raising Sunshines easier for him.
Luis is in the process of opening a new range area and now plans to have a quadrant for every batch. He was surprised how this present batch of 200 wiped out grass in an area of 150sqm in less than 2weeks!
We didn't plan to have lunch there, but the aroma of kalderetang Sunshine from the kitchen, across the nipa hut where we sat, was calling or names distinctly. The fact that we hardly have rice with our meals, made the table spread seem too much. Well, the magic word was "seem"...na seemot ang table :)
We knew we will be there more often, after tasting Edwin's cooking and because they will load more chicks at more regular intervals.
Next stop was a farm near Malarayat Golf. Suggestions were made to correct feeding and housing as brooding stage wasn't managed well. But the chicks were so happy when we taught caretaker to chop a banana trunk and feed it to them...they were so excited.
Last stop was calling on dealers for the area as we had been getting a lot of inquiries from Batangas. We wanted to make sure that the link to the backyard farmers are established.
