Government neglect, hard life and a tough terrain rolled into one have prompted Benguet’s vegetable farmers to innovate some simple technologies, which are now helping lighten their burden.

One such technology is the tramline, which uses pulleys and a vehicle engine to convey baskets and sacks of cabbages and potatoes from a foothill or river valley to a higher elevation, where a truck or a jeep is waiting.

Another is the use of PVC pipes to tap water from springs and creeks to irrigate vegetable farms even kilometers away from water sources.

Along the rugged Halsema Highway, Metro Manila’s main link to Benguet’s vegetable belt, one cannot escape seeing one-inch PVC pipes crisscrossing mountains,

The tramline and the PVC irrigation pipes are proudly the Benguet farmers’ innovation.

In Barangay Dalipey in Bakun, Benguet, Kankaaey and Bago folk installed in April a tramline which can transport uphill and downhill a 200-kg load in one go at a 1,095-meter distance in seven to 10 minutes.

The facility is a project of the Bakun Indigenous Tribes Organization, a grassroots-based organization supported by the International Labor Organization Interregional Program to Support Self-Reliance of Indigenous and Tribal Communities and the Netherlands government.

The P229,000 tramline, which the community residents themselves recommended and installed, now serves 15 families. The families use the tramline to transport potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and rice from their farms downhill.

From a road uphill, where the tramline engine is stationed, these farm folk load fertilizers and other farm supplies. What 10 people can transport on their backs by foot in eight hours, the tramline can do in an hour.

Cost saver

With the tramline, Dalipey farm folk can save 60 percent in cost because before the equipment was installed, a farmer had to hire people to haul his products. The equipment, local farmers said, has also helped save time by as much as 70 percent.

In neighboring Atok town, the tramline has freed farmers from the backbreaking task of having to carry on their shoulders baskets and sacks of potatoes and cabbages and chicken manure (for fertilizer).

Atok farmer Francis Aniban, 45, recalls those days when he had to hire seven to 10 men to haul on their backs cabbages to a kilometer away for a day. He also had to feed these men.

But with the tramline installed in 1997 at hi sfarm in Barangay Sayangan, all Aniban needs is five liters of diesel fuel to run the engine of a tramline he and four other neighbors installed. What the 10 men used to haul in a day, the tramline can transport in two or three hours.

Pulley technology

The tramline is a simple pulley technology, which is propelled by a stationary vehicle engine. Attached to the engine is a cable with pulleys on both ends.

Like a vehicle, the tramline engine has brakes and accelerators to regulate the speed of transported loads. But the engine is operated only when hauling loads uphill. The engine can be stopped when transporting loads downhill.

Vegetable farmers learned the tramline technology from mining and logging firms. Former workers of these firms, who went back to farming, introduced the tramline, Aniban said.

If developed further with enough support, this simple tramline technology can also transport people as Switzerland’s cable cars do. In fact, in Sayangan, Atok, a few people had dared to ride to ride a tramline when a landslide cut a big portion of the Halsema Highway, Aniban said.