Philippines: A bright future for farming: 20-year-old agriculture student leads a youth urban farm in Taguig
Their best sellers are lettuce and basil. They sell lettuce for P100 per three heads and basil for P80 per 100 grams.
By Jazzmine Quiambao
Manila Bulletin
February 16, 2023
Excerpt:
However, Anna Beatriz Suavengco, the person behind Tik Tok’s Urban Farmer TV, breaks that assumption. As an agriculture student in University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), Suavengco is driven to lead the youth towards choosing agriculture as a career.
However, taking an agriculture course isn’t Suavengco’s only contribution to agriculture; She also leads and manages City Farm, a 200 square meter urban farm in Brgy. North Signal, Taguig, where the local youth takes center stage.
Suavengco started City Farm with her two friends, Aissha Cruz and Jerome Sombilon. But as the only one with a background in agriculture, Suavengco is the lead farmer of 30 volunteers from different youth organizations. Altogether, there are over 30 people who farm and tend to their planted lettuce, herbs, and other vegetables.
Suavengco’s exposure to farming started early in life.
“I grew up with my grandmother in Mindanao,” Suavengco said in Tagalog. “There, life was simple. We didn’t have a lot, but there was never a time we went hungry because we had a small backyard, a small farm in Mindanao.” That started Suavengco’s passion in agriculture.
