15/10/2025
This is so exciting, Apl.de.Ap!
As an integrated farm, we know by experience that a healthy diversity of plants is the way to go if we want to secure our food sources.
At our farm, we also plant coconut trees, cacao, coffee and banana trees.
I wanted to share with you all how thankful my team and I are for GMA's coverage of our pilot at Esmeris Farm yesterday. So many of you have reached out to us with support on how you can get involved, and so many others have asked how my team and I got started on such an ambitious project.
Where did it start? Like everything that grows, it started with the soil. During the pandemic I met the one and only Sadhguru. We spent our time together discussing the dangers of soil degradation and how vulnerable it makes our food supply.
From those early conversations our team discovered biochar, learning about its positive effects on restoring the soil. We also learned that coconut husks โ something thrown away in their millions across our country โ was something that could effectively produce this biochar.
What is โbiocharโ? Simply put, biochar is an organic soil made from heating organic matter in a low-oxygen environment, a process called โpyrolysisโ.
Our efforts to persue biochar led us to the Philippine Coconut Authority, who told us about their own ambitious mission to plant 100 million coconut trees and restore the Philippines as the number one coconut producer in the world, a title that we had carried as a nation for decades but recently lost. They made me the Coconut Ambassador; I was humbled in their belief in me.
But in order to create the healthy soil needed for a project of this size, the ground simply cannot be monocropped by planting millions of coconut trees. Fields and fields of the same plant create a graveyard where the grower only cares about the end product, and where natureโs crucial biodiversity is not protected. This is something that a number of you have correctly pointed out. Rest assured, this is not what we're doing.
My team and I, OMTSE, are planting food forests, coconut trees intercropped with native malunggay, coffee, and cacao species. We are targeting more than 350 million trees in this mission. We are working hard with the government, small and large stakeholder farmers, the indigenous communities, offtakers, and anyone who will lend us their support to ensure a revitalization of the countryโs agriculture industry. And where does that begin? By ensuring a healthy soil that can withstand generations and continue feeding our future.
The photo below is of a coffee tree we planted in Brookes Point on Earth Day 2023, intercropped between existing coconut trees. The soil you see it standing in was strengthened with biochar. In 2024, as many of you will know, an el nino swept through Palawan, destroying many plants in its wake. Our coffee plant was not one of them. The photo you see is Earth Day 2025, and our coffee tree is thriving. It is growing. It is strong. This is why the soil is so important.
Together we can do this. Together we can grow.
