Conglomerate San Miguel Corp. is heeding the call of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization to promote urban farming and sustainable agriculture.
Its Backyard Bukid program, initiated in 2021 to assist service personnel during the pandemic, has grown into a vibrant urban farm at the company’s head office complex, now cultivating 39 varieties of flowering plants and vegetables.
Covering 750 square meters, the space now includes a plant nursery, 80 garden plots, and also functions as a center for employee wellness, volunteerism and training.
Replicated in several SMC facilities by the San Miguel Foundation, the project has recently been expanded through a partnership with Urban Farmers PH, enhancing the farm’s diversity and variety of produce.
Among the farmyard staples tomato, okra, ampalaya, the farm produces kale, romaine lettuce and other salad greens.
“I am proud to see the progress of our Backyard Bukid project. Apart from promoting urban agriculture, it has also become a space for our support staff to collaborate and learn life-long skills that will help them become more resilient and self-sufficient,” says San Miguel president and chief executive officer Ramon S. Ang.
“I’m grateful to our partner, Urban Farmers PH, for helping us expand this project. Our goal is to extend this initiative to even more facilities, involve more employees, and encourage other companies to do the same,” Ang said.
Louie Gutierrez, Urban Farmers PH founder and farmer-in-chief, said: “We’re really happy and excited to be connecting with companies like San Miguel. The pandemic showed us that we need to have growing vegetables in idle lands in the city. We hope this project inspires SMC employees and other companies to get into agriculture because this is the future of our food.”
The FAO has advocated urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA), or practices that yield food and other outputs through agricultural production and related processes taking place on land and other spaces within cities and surrounding regions.
It involves urban and peri-urban actors, communities, methods, places, policies, institutions, systems, ecologies and economies, largely using and regenerating local resources to meet changing needs of local populations while serving multiple goals and functions.
At least 55 percent of the world’s population already lives in urban areas and up to 70 percent of all food produced globally is destined for consumption in city spaces, according to FAO.
Social, economic and environmental sustainability of food systems and the evolution of urban diets will be largely dependent on the management of food systems in urban and peri-urban areas.
Urban Farmers PH was established in 2021 with the aim of converting underutilized public spaces into thriving urban farms. It has several ongoing projects, including urban farms in Taguig and Makati cities. It is also a grand prize winner of the Copenhagen Business School’s ImpaktWISE Awards, which recognizes organizations that offer solutions to social, environmental, and economic challenges.
“We’re really happy and excited to be connecting with companies like San Miguel. The pandemic showed us that we need to have growing vegetables in idle lands in the city. We hope this project inspires SMC employees and other companies to get into agriculture because this is the future of our food,” says Louie Gutierrez, Urban Farmers PH founder and farmer-in-chief.
San Miguel’s’s Backyard Bukid follows a harvest cycle of 20 to 35 days. Once the produce is harvested, it is distributed among members who then sell it to employees.
Some of the harvest is also bought by San Miguel and donated to its Better World Tondo community center for its daily feeding program. The company has plans to buy the vegetables for the office canteen.
Support staff involved in the project dedicate an hour every morning and afternoon to tend to the farm. They attend weekly plant care sessions with Urban Farmers PH.
As one of the biggest and most diversified conglomerates in the country, San Miguel has launched several initiatives that aim to promote agriculture and assist local farmers.
In July 2020, the company opened Better World Diliman, a community center that serves as a ready market for excess produce from all over Luzon. To date, Better World Diliman has rescued over 950,000 kilograms of produce and helped some 4,500 farmers—and in the process, helped reduce food waste from local farms.