Intent on helping provide food for the family, Sonia Soriao Padilla sought permission from a neighbor to use a small part of the latter’s land to create three plots on which she planted pechay using three “paminta” packs of seeds and a capital of just P80 in 2003.
When the vegetables were harvested after a month and she looked at her records, the recent winner of the Department of Agriculture’s 2025 Search for Outstanding Rural Women realized that she had earned a profit of P3,000.
“Naengganyo ako,” she told the Tribune in an interview at her modest family home in barangay Buhi, San Miguel. “Nagdagdag na ako ning pakwan, ampalaya, mga gulay para sa pakbet.”
The then 33-year-old mother of four children with her husband, abaca farmer Enrique, had vowed to herself that she would not let her own family suffer the difficulties she had encountered while growing up.
“Sobrang sakit ning buhay,” Padilla recalled of her young life when she and her siblings had to be satisfied with what her father earned as an abaca farmer, subsisting on about a thousand pesos every week.
She said that while she finished elementary grades, she was not able to get past the first year in high school.
While her husband Enrique was stripping abaca fiber in the mountains, she began tending to the three plots of pechay while caring for her young kids, with the eldest in Grade 4 at the time.
By the time the farm was earning enough to put food on the family’s table, Sonia was always attending trainings being conducted by the municipal and provincial agriculture offices and at the same time getting ideas and learning from the experience of other farmers.
The family now engages in crop production (rice, watermelon, vegetables, peanuts, abaca and coconut), animal production (swine, chicken and duck, carabao and goat), and tilapia farming in a 500-square meter pond.
In 2023, RGSP Farm yielded 1.2 metric tons of squash, 3.34 MT of peanuts, 0.63 MT of hot pepper, 5.56 MT of rice, 15 MT of watermelons, 0.42 MT of ampalaya and 2.8 MT of eggplants, not to mention rental income from a 4WD tractor and hand tractor.
From their modest earnings, the Padilla couple managed to buy on two installments a total of two hectares of farmland, in addition to the 4,000-square meter rice land that had been mortgaged by her parents to relatives and a 5,0000-square meter abaca plot inherited from her parents.
Their eldest, civil engineer Daniel Nico, gained employment as a casual employee at the municipal government after a stint with a contractor, with the second son, agriculture graduate Robert Glenn, following suit.
Daniel eventually became the municipal engineer upon the retirement of his boss, with the now married Robert Glenn obtaining permanent status as Agriculturist II.
The third child in the family, Jemaima, is a computer engineer working as senior data analyst in Metro Manila while the youngest, Stephanie, is a 2nd year BS Agribusiness student at the Catanduanes State University where her siblings all graduated.
Sonia says that of the four, Robert Glenn spends most of his time outside office hours at the family farm, which is named RGSP Farm after his initials.
With most of the children already employed, the Padillas have started building a concrete house at an elevated portion of the barangay.
Sonia recalled that during supertyphoon Rolly in 2020, the river’s swell flooded their existing house up to the roof, with the family enduring a similar but less dangerous experience when supertyphoon Pepito hit the island last year.
Up to now, she said, their clothes and important belongings are still packed in plastic boxes where they were stored during the recent heavy rains brought by the shear line occurrence in February.
Sonia stated that while the two storms washed out the farm in 2020 and 2024, it did not cause any considerable loss as they occurred at the end of the farming season.
“I always make sure that the plants are ready for harvest right before the start of the typhoon season,” she told the Tribune.
She admitted that it was the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2021 that inflicted nearly half a million pesos on the farm, as they were unable to sell thousands of watermelons to their usual customers – restaurants and resorts – due to lack of clients and the quarantine restrictions.
“We had to give most of the harvest away to anybody who wanted it,” Sonia shared, adding that they kept the good ones for sale within San Miguel.
The family also lost two sows during the 2023 African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreak and another to last year’s flooding.
She likewise recalled that when they started expanding the farm, she found it difficult to hire workers from among barangay residents who probably thought she would not be able to pay them and did not appear the following day.
As a result, they recruited laborers from across the river in barangay Obo, two of whom had been with the farm since then: a single mother whose child is in high school and another woman who is striving to have her child become a chemical engineer.
Last week during the Tribune visit, her husband and about eight workers were harvesting rice and peanuts, with sacks of “mani” to be sold at the Virac public market.
After setting aside enough rice for family consumption, Sonia sells the excess rice to the National Food Authority in Virac at P23 per kilo, noting the irony when she recalled that the family often survived on NFA rice “lugaw” during the early years.
On the other hand, about three thousand watermelons are set for picking this week in time for the influx of visitors during the Holy Week.
“We usually plant watermelon seeds ahead of summer while vegetables are scheduled from July to November,” she said.
Water for the farm comes courtesy of the barangay’s Level II water system, delivered from the distribution pipe from the main road a kilometer way through a half-inch PE pipe.
Sonia disclosed that, instead of farm equipment like rice harvester or thresher to be granted by DA, she requested that instead, the equipment be replaced with a solar-powered water pump so that even their neighboring farms could benefit from it.
The family is still paying for a P1.28-million multi-tilling machine acquired through a loan from the Department of Science and Technology’s SETUP program that provides loans of as much as P5 million for micro, small and medium enterprises.
With two more years to go on her repayment period, the DA regional office has promised to ask the DOST to grant a moratorium for the SETUP beneficiaries to allow them to recover from the effects of last year’s typhoons.
She expressed hope that other Catandunganon women would learn from the example she and other women farmers have set, that farming can be provide food on the family table and earn a modest profit despite the challenges posed by typhoons and man-made crises.