TORREVILLAS
visited one hito farm in barangay Looc, Calamba, Laguna a couple of months ago and met the owner, Valie Baricanosa, who told us the earliest hito farm in Looc was started 25 years ago. He himself went into the business 15 years ago.
Valie, 52, and very soft-spoken owns 3,490 sq.m. of land on which he made 14 ponds or “butas” of varying sizes (from 100 sq.m. to 315 sq.m.) He rents an adjoining one-hectare area into which he made eight ponds. In these ponds, watered by generators, he raises his own fries and fingerlings, and after five months sells the three-five kilo hito at P78 per kilo. Each pond can accommodate 10,000 hitos.
Valie talks of past great harvests of 20 tons or 20,000 kilos of hito in one year, enabling him to pay off debts incurred when he was in the welding business, buy three vans and build a house. But nature was unkind: typhoons came one after the other: Ondoy, Santi and habagats, swept away his aquatic production, even the incidental pond for cream dowry, a piggery and chicken poultry, and even the banana plants on both sides of the road. Just a few days before the presidential election, his harvest was only 1.2 tons, or 1,200 kilos of the fish. His once eight farm hands have been reduced to three.
Valie took the two-year welding course at the Technological University of the Philippines in Manila. He worked for a construction firm, then put up his own welding shop which specialized in making steel windows, then later, a hardware store. When business slowed down on account of customers not paying him on time (sometimes not at all), he decided to go into hito production. To his pleasant surprise, his new endeavor paid off, enabling him to pay debts he had incurred, buy three vans, and build two houses, one in Looc, the other at the farm.
His popularity as a hito raiser won him cash prizes. First, P30,00 from the Calamba municipality, then P6,000 from Sta. Cruz, and P30,000 from Lucena.
Buyers of his harvests are from Tuguegarao and Bulacan, who sell their fish in malls. It pays to bond with other small hito raisers, and members of the Calamba Parish Cooperative, the Calamba Rice Grower group, and the coop for waste management which makes fertilizers.
His lovely wife, Marissa, is an ever-helpful mate. When we were at their farm house, she prepared dishes out of hito, assisted by her equally lovely daughters, Alyssa, a third year accountancy major, and Alyanna, a sophomore majoring in marketing, both at the College of Letran in Calamba City. The youngest, Adrian, is in the second grade.
The typhoons stole much of his production; now the hot climate is drying up his ponds. But Valie plods on, hoping that the weather changes for good, and keep alive a hito growing industry that is a source of income for him and other hito growers. He keeps alive the saying, Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
* * * Email: dominitorrevillas@gmail.com