Mrs. Edna Viterbo, owner of Talon Integrated Farm started as a hobbyist. Her husband was an agriculture graduate from UP Los Baños and when they were newly married, he often gifted her with orchid plants from his classmates in Los banos. This started her love for plants orchids in particular.
After a while she would expand her collection of orchids by buying whatever right her eye. And when her collection of orchid’s plants was quite big enough for her backyard garden, shes asked for a portion of their farm in Talon (about 100 of meters) for orchids. Friends began buying from her and eventually she had to expand. Each year her garden doubled and she joined the Capiz multi-purpose Cooperative around 1985 to learn more about plants and orchids in particular. She attended lecture and seminars about plants, draceana, harvesting, and packing, everything that she had to know about farming.
In the course of expansion she also meets and dealt with sources of planting materials and market for her plants. In 1998 she started growing orchids for cut flowers commercially and then in 2005 she meet a Japanese buyer of cut flowers and cut foliage offered to buy cut foliage from the cooperative and also orchids flower.
Everything was going well. The farm was also delivering palms, ornamental plants to landscaping project in Boracay and Iloilo. However typhoon Frank hit the farm and everything was destroyed. The greenhouse, plants, houses. The week about to give up but then, Mrs. Viterbo was able to get loan to build her farm again, so study late last year, orchids are again a bloom the farm has started exporting again cut foliage to Japan and after of rehabilitation the plants again are grow healthy and landscapes are again ordering for their projects.
One day they try to keep in their farm is to be environmental friendly. As much as possible they refrain from using pesticides and fungicide and they use organic fertilizers from Vermicast. Lately they have started growing organic vegetables.
