A DESIGNER, ARTIST, FARMER, AND MOTHER
Pinky Peralta, an interior designer and a weekend farmer, discovered farming 14 years ago. And because she was lacking in knowledge, she had to learn it from scratch. One thing that led her into farming was her eagerness to connect with nature during a depressing season of her life. “I had practically zero knowledge and skills in agriculture. All I knew is that I had this desire to reconnect with the land. It was my way of knowing the essence of my existence as a beloved child of God.”
Apart from being a woman of many titles, Peralta is also a nurturing mother of two. In the same year that Weekend Farmer (TWF) was born, she also had a miscarriage. She used farming to heal internally and TWF came to be an outlet that helped her to recover from grief and loss.
Despite having no experience in growing any sort of food, this weekend farmer read books, attended trainings, and asked people with farming experiences. She says, “I set out to learn by attending a lot of training and workshops available to gear me towards this transition. I know for a fact that what I wanted is organic and natural farming, having read Fukuoka’s Last Straw Revolution book. So I set out to learn and learn the natural way.”
The Weekend Farmer is an 2.5-hectare agritourism farm situated in Alfonso, Cavite that houses perennial trees like Antipolo, coffee, bignay, madre de cacao (Gliricidia sepium), and jackfruit integrated with livestock, poultry, and beekeeping. Back in 2006, the Peraltas bought the land and envisioned the farm to be the source of their food. Today, they get to enjoy the farm and its produce that took more than 10 years in the making.
This story is from the July - August 2021 edition of Agriculture.
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This story is from the July - August 2021 edition of Agriculture.
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