Business Ideas, October 1988

Technology is what he is rich in

Especially those he has launched to profitable business producing oranges and grapes and other fruit like seedless atis.

     Even experts at the Bureau of Plant Industry and the University of the Philippines at Los Baños - those who have real PhD degrees - point to him as the authority on grapes and oranges in the Philippines.

     Such referrals occupy him. He lives not in an ivory tower, but in the heart of Quezon City, among of the plants he has loved all his life.

     His dream is an orange and grape industry the would be earning precious dollars for the country. "I have turned down a number of offers to work abroad because I wanted to help," he said. His dreams are beginning to come true.

     At the Central Luzon State University, his alma mater, for example, a fruit research center is being established. A one-hectare orange grove is being put up to serve as laboratory for students who want to learn the culture of this promising export crop, with Dizon as the source of technology. In addition, he gets invited to lecture on his favorite crops in many parts of the country, not to mention his holding court at his 1,500 square meter nursery on the grounds of UP Bliss in Quezon City where hundreds of people interested in planting grapes and oranges flock. 

     Often, these people are interested to start with backyard operations to find out if they could go full blast with these crops.

     Most of the week, however, is spent on developing a 40-hectare farm in Banban, Tarlac, of Arnadlo P. Dizon, a board member of the province.

     For grapes alone, he has such varieties as plain red seedless, black seedless, ruby seedless, Thompson, and Australian black - varieties which he has found to be suited to the climate and soil of the Philippines.

     Such rich collection which could not be found anywhere was built up from the seedlings brought to him by people like Alex Reyes Jr. of the Aristocrat Restaurant, Desiderato Aquino and Balikbayans who wanted to find out if the plants they would discover abroad would survive under Philippine conditions.

     "They just come to me and entrust their seedlings. I make them survive and study how to propagate them," he said.

     To willing disciples who have since made money on the technology he has developed, he seems to have set aside business in favor of his mission. It shows on the very nursery itself, where workers prepare seedlings under a dilapidated nipa hut, and his home which is one of the units in the government's low-cost housing project near the University of the Philippines.

     "I am not rich. I never was rich," he told Business Ideas magazine. But his nursery is rich. It has trees bearing such fruits as oranges, Davao pomelo, King mandarin, grapefruit, guapple (giant guavas), Thailand "songsong" pomelo, seedless oranges, and the most promising of all orange varieties, the Satsuma, which originated from Japan.

     Dizon believes that the country could have been an orange exporter a long time ago.

     However, the crop did not prosper much because those who knew how to plant oranges in plantations kept the technology to themselves.

     He cited the case of those in Mindanao, the primary source of high-quality oranges and pomelos in the country. He said the Mindanao producers were afraid that if Luzon would produce its own oranges and pomelos, they would no longer be able to sell their produce.

     Another reason is the infestation of citrus crops several years ago. Leaf mottling disease practically wiped out the citrus industry in Luzon, which had begun to grow in Batangas.

     And many people who believed they have planted oranges realized only too late that they were raising another corp. "I was victimized myself," Dizon said, "when I bought 5,000 Valencia seedlings which turned out to be grapefruit."

     But by keen observation and faithfulness to the scientific procedures he had learned in college, Dizon has built up an inventory of high-yielding, fast growing and profitable orange varieties.

     These include such sweet orange varieties as Navel, Hamlin, Pineapple (starkly similar to the Perante Orange feature in the March issue of Business Ideas), Jaffa and Valencia.

     "A mature orange tree can earn about P5,000," he said. A hectare can yield profit of P200,000 yearly and above, depending on the richness of the soil.

     When he started the UP Bliss nursery in 1981 after working for other people, he wanted a fruit production operation. But since he lacked capital, he limited his operations to operating a nursery.

     At least, he reasoned out, the nursery was small enough for the money he had. Besides, he could continue studying the crops so that he would be well-prepared when he is ready to go into commercial fruit production.

     It turned out that the nursery helped not only himself but also those who came to him for advise and initial planting materials.

     "Many people come and spend the whole day interviewing me. They end up buying seedlings at a discount," he said. Many of them have since gone to business on their own, using his seedlings as foundation stock.

     Dizon is confident of the technology he has developed over the last seven years that he has been operating his nursery. Some elements of this technology even date back to decades ago when he was still with Raxas Y Cia, which operated a citrus plantation in an area that is now known as the Batulao Village Resort.

     Over the years, he has also scored breakthroughs, some of which cannot be found in scientific literature. That is why he is enthusiastic about the project at CLSU because he could formally validate his findings.

     For example, he can shorten the time in which fruit trees grow to start commercial production. He does this by grafting another rootstock to an already budded plant so that plant's root system is doubles and its intake of nutrients is doubled. So instead of an orange plant taking up to five years to begin bearing fruit, one needs only to wait one and a half years.

     Fruit trees can also be dwarfed by physical manipulation and made it more productive, he said. This is done by making a plant's branches spread out through physical means, like trying them so they would bend sidewards. He said this technique is based on the fact that auxin, the growth hormone of plants, normally goes to the top-most plant, resulting in an upward growth.

     By bending the branches sideways, one is able to increase the growth surface of a plant, because the branches due to the action of the auxin. With the tree having more branches, it would have more fruit-bearing points.

     Even as a student at CLSU, Dizon has taken special liking for plant nutrition. As a professional agronomist, he has found out that for fruit trees, potassium is the most important plant nutrient compared to nitrogen and phosphorus.

     For example, he said, one should not apply too much nitrogen. "If you apply urea, which is 45 percent nitrogen, the fruiting is aborted even through he flowers have emerged," he said. He recommends organic and complete fertilizer.

     Grapes also hold a special promise to entrepreneurs, Dizon said. Once hectare of grapes can yield profits of up to P500,000 because of the generally high prices in the local market.

     But Dizon said he could not go into grapes himself because of the huge capital needs. Still, he has studied grapes as closely as oranges and he become an authority on the crop.

     His studies have in fact yielded a number of breakthroughs.

     For example, he said the sprouting average for grapes trees in the Philippines is only about five percent. He explained that this is because the sprouts develop only where pruning is done. In temperate countries, the sprouting rate of buds is up to 95 percent.

     Through studies at his nursery, Dizon found the by "torturing" the plant, he could increase the sprouting rate 10 times, which translates to a 10-fold increase in fruit production. This is done by bending the vines - a whole circle every two feet of vine, with the end portion pointing downward.

     He explained that the stress caused by this "torture" triggers the fruiting mechanism within the grape plant. 

     Dizon has also found a way to induce continuous fruiting.

     The current practice is to have two fruiting during the 120 days of the dry season in many parts of the country. If the rains do not stop early enough during a particular year, the fruiting opportunity is cut down to half.

     To avoid this limitation, Dizon has developed a pruning technique which induces fruiting in both the brown (woody stemmed) vines and the younger green vines. With the vines having two growing points each with a different fruiting pace, the plants are made to fruit continuously during the fruiting season.

     To cut production costs, Dizon has also found that pruning can be used to limit the growth of the vines. "The grape vine produces only a set number of fruit. If you allow wild growth, you will only be wasting fertilizers, chemicals and labor for unproductive portions," he said.

     The love for plants has been with Dizon since he was in high school at the Sabani State Agricultural College in Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija.

     There amid the laboratory farms to which students were exposed, Dizon developed a love for fruit trees.

     Such interest continued when he went to the Central Luzon State University, where he specialized in plant nutrition. While there, he studied the basics - rice, corn and vegetable production.

     This education resulted in his being appointed farm manager of Roxas y Cia in Nasugbu, Batangas. There, he was in charge of the sugar and rice plantations. He also provided extension service to other projects of the company - coconuts, coffee and citrus. In the meantime, he took up commerce in one of the college in nearby Batangas City.

     After the leaf mottling disease epidemic wiped out the citrus plantation, he left the company to join the National Irrigation Administration as an agronomist.

     He work brought him throughout Central Luzon and up to Cagayan Valley.

     Dizon pawn his house and lot in Nueva Ecija, to raise P25,000 with which he started a nursery at UP Bliss.

     Today, he has his sight on making the country a major fruit exporter. After all, he has 30,000 seedlings at nay one time - more than enough to spawn an industry.

     In addition, he offers free lectures on orange production every Sunday at the UP Bliss Economic Garden. At other times of the week, he can be contacted at the Dizon Fruit Research and Development Center Km 101.3 MacArthur Highway, Barangay Annupul, Bamban, Tarlac.