My soil journey

I have been collaborating with farmers throughout Canada, particularly in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario since 2015. My primary goal is to assist land stewards in understanding how they can affect soil health. In my effort to regenerate degraded landscapes, I learned that compost, mainly when managed well, can provide the foundation to kickstart the microbial processes that stimulate nutrient cycling and decomposition.

Before discovering the importance of soil health, my background was in computing science and building software applications where it is often asked, "How can we do things better?". I collected and analyzed data based on how people interacted with each other and optimized company operations using knowledge-driven software to help diverse companies make sense of their data.

I spent my childhood and early adolescence in the Philippines. Growing up with my two older brothers, I discovered my enjoyment of plants and bugs early in life. And since we did not have a lot of toys, we mostly played in our backyard, which was full of fruit trees, and used only our imagination. Our home was situated near mountains, surrounded by lush tropical vegetation teeming with diverse life. There were insects of all kinds, and they were everywhere. We fed mantids and dragonflies with houseflies we caught with our bare hands. We would let soldier termites bite a stick as we placed them in a colony of red ants and watched them fight for their life. And we used a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the backs of plump green caterpillars devouring our Santol tree. I also remember having to close one eye as I was riding my bike down a road with a thick cloud of bugs ready to blind anyone who dared to ride down that road without goggles. My brothers and I performed many other gory experiments on these tiny, six-legged creatures mainly because we were curious. But for whatever reason, these experiences imprinted most heavily into my subconscious, and perhaps the guilt behind those childhood experiments led me to where I am today.

In 2010, when I visited my family in the Philippines, I saw first-hand the damaging practices of the Green Revolution (GR) still lingering in small farming communities. Farming rice is a livelihood in my family, and GR prescribed the adoption of hybridized rice cultivars that required intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides while gradually abandoning cultivation using traditional methods.