Batac, Ilocos Norte-Florencio Vicente, a farmer in barangay San Marcelino in Dingras town in Ilocos Norte, was hesitant to plant the controversial Bt corn.

First of all, it was untried and unfamiliar. Then, as with other superstitious barrio folk, he felt that the day chosen for planting the corn variety that had sparked countless protests was ominous because it fell on a 13th last February.

And just it was superstitiously inopportune, February was not the right planting season, according to the normal cycle of corn farmers, because by the time the plants would be mature and ready for harvest, it would have been already the rainy season.

But Vicente, along with 33 others farmers from Dingras and Vintar towns, was convinced to plant by the provincial office of the Department of Agriculture, headed by Francisco Pilar, and the provincial government, under Gov. Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., who wanted to test-pilot the Bt corn on 10 hectares.

The farmers were provided soft loans to buy the YieldGard variety from the US-based company Monsanto and the fertilizers, as well as to shoulder part of the labor cost. 

True enough, the corn were overtaken by the rains under which the harvesting was conducted. But the harvest time on May 23 turned into what they dubbed as a "harvest festival," attended by 420 people undampened by the inclement weather.

Under the auspices of Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), the first batch of farmers which planted its farms to Bt corn recounted its experience on July 31 to journalists in a media encounter held at the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) in Paoay, Ilocos Norte.

The farmers were unanimous in their praise for the YieldGard corn: It increased their harvest yields and, consequently, their profits.

Their harvests, they said, were all bought by animal-feed millers. 

But for Vincent, who said he made a net profit of P15,000 from the less-than-a-hectare plot after subtracting expenses and playing his loan, the increased gain was a welcome find most needed to sustain growing expenses for five schooling children. 

Vincent said equally happy were the farmers' wives because "our incomes rose." A gleeful Geronimo Maximo, also of Dingras, quipped that their wives had found spare money to buy makeup kits.

The farmers have become so receptive to Bt corn that according to Vicente, who is chairman of the Irrigators Association of San Marcelino, Dingras farmers would be ordering 300 bags of YieldGard corn for the next planting season. This means that altogether, 300 hectares will be planted to Bt corn. A bag of YieldGard 818 corn variety weighing 18 kilos fills up a one-hectare plantation.

Vicente himself will be allotting three hectares for Bt corn, he told TODAY in a separate interview.

Vicente said he reluctantly planted Bt corn on 6,000 square meters, considering it only a trial, or even a gamble.

But a gamble it didn't turn out to be. "I made a clean, net profit of P15,000," he grinned, more than what he would have earned from a non-Bt corn variety.

According to Pilar, Vicente and all the other 22 farmers from Dingras had fully paid their loans, while the farmers from Vintar have paid back 70 percent of their loans, for some reasons. Sergio Villanueva, of barangay San Ramon in Vintar, for example, said that he made only a small profit because he planted late and so he didn't reach the cutoff time to be able to avail himself of the irrigation. 

The farmers said they liked planting Bt corn because "we encountered no pest," referring to the corn borer. Besides, Vicente said, "Konti lang ang trabaho, Pag natanim mo na, hindi mo na kailangan mag-spray ng insecticides [There's less work. After planting it, there's no need to spray insecticides]." And, he added, there are more yields and the kernels are bigger than the variety they used to plant.

The Philippines approved the propagation of Bt corn in December last year. Many sectors, including local churches, have opposed Bt corn mainly on health and environmental concerns. Several militant farmers' groups have also rallied, with some members going on hunger strike for days, against the variety, They have called a moratorium on the propagation of the corn, where a specific Bacillus thuringiensis gene is inserted to produce a protein that's supposed to protect the corn plant from feeding the Asiatic corn borers.

But the Department of Agriculture rejected the moratorium demand, saying that it had no basis to declare Bt corn unsafe. The DA says that as a policy, it encourages further studies to provide science-based support to differing claims.

The DA bolsters its stand with its claim that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the European Commission and the national academies of science and technology of several countries, including the Philippines, had declared the Bt corn and other genetically modified, or GM, crops as safe and posing no additional threats to humans and the environment.

As far as the Ilocos Norte farmers are concerned, it's so far so good, seeing the variety as a way out of poverty or passport to prosperity.

Other sectors have also not posed any protest or objection to it, according to Dr. Saturnino M. Ocampo Jr., president of the MMSU, which was chosen as one of the multilocation trial venues of YieldGard corn.

The country will be waiting for more results from the trailblazing experiments of the Ilocos Norte corn farmers, and based on those results, farmers from other parts of the Philippines are sure to make their own moves.