Champions Of The Earth” – United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Honors 5 For 2022 – Here Am I Looking At 2023 With My Intelligent Rotavator!?

Saturday, 26 Nov 2022, Manila, I was surprised and excited reading the announcement via Facebook from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) about its “Champions Of The Earth” awards – 5 winners this year: a conservationist, sustainable waste management enterprise, an economist, a women’s rights activist, and wildlife biologist. A consistent, confident, constructive blogger for Regenerative Agriculture, I am now looking at 2023!

(images: “Champions” from european-environment-foundation.eu,“Act Now” from unep.org)

Wikipedia says (en.wikipedia.org) “[The] UNEP established Champions of the Earth in 2005 as an annual awards program to recognize outstanding environmental leaders from the public and private sectors, and from civil society.”

Can you – and I – aspire for the award? My answer is “Yes.” On 22 Nov 2022, UN News announced (news.un.org):

UNEP’s annual Champions of the Earth award is the UN’s highest environmental honor, which recognizes individuals and organizations from a number of fields, including civil society, academia and the private sector, that are blazing a trail in protecting our natural world.

I understand that to mean anyone or any group can be declared a “Champion of the Earth” by “blazing a trail in protecting our natural world.”

Good, but not good enough! UNEP I believe is unwittingly limiting its search for “Champions of the Earth” among the protectors of Mother Nature, neitherincluding those enrichers of her fertility, nor those regeneratorsof such fertility.

As an agriculturist (UP Los Baños, BSA major in Ag Edu, 1965), I favor “Regenerative Agriculture” (RA), as conceived by American organic pioneer Robert Rodale in the 1980s.

When I started writing on organic agriculture (OA) sometime in the mid-1960s, the professors of my alma mater University of the Philippines College of Agriculture (now UP Los Baños) were neither talking about OA nor were they teaching it. I discovered my OA when at the open shelves of the UPLB library I chanced upon the books of American gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner talking about the folly of plowing and the wisdom of “trash farming” – Plowman’s Folly was published 1943 and Soil Development 1952.

In 1965, running an off-the-shelf rotavator with my adjustments-alignments, I reinvented Mr Faulkner’s trash into an “automatic organic mulch” (aOM), which is simultaneously created and spread across the field. My brother-in-law Enso Casasos, a farmer in my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan, successfully created himself that aOM and consistently out-yieldedmuch his neighbor-farmers. (Unfortunately, he died many years ago.)

I want to go after that UNEP prize and be a Champion of the Earth, with a reinvented rotavator. But I need some financing to come up with an intelligent rotavator that produces that aOM without me. An intelligent farm machine! A small-big dream of mine for farmers.

Prior to that, meanwhile, I am offering this compromise: If someone can come up with a budget for me to conduct techno demos using off-the-shelf rotavatorsin 5 locations – Ilocos Region, Cordilleras, Cagayan Valley, Central Luzon, and Southern Tagalog – I can demonstrate in actual practice what I'm talking about. Any brave financier?@517