The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) is putting up a regional hub for Project Smarter Approaches to Reinvigorate Agriculture as an Industry (SARAI) in Eastern Visayas to boost farm productivity and food security.<\/p>\n
The DOST regional office in this town will host the hub meant to localize and deploy climate-resilient tools for improved food security across the country, said DOST Regional Director John Glenn Oca\u00f1a in an interview on Monday.<\/p>\n
Science and Technology Secretary Renato Solidum will lead the opening on Jan. 22, 2026 with other key officials from the agency\u2019s main office.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe regional hub is a center where all the actions for SARAI will emanate from. All agriculture data from LGUs will be processed in the hub for better decision-making,\u201d Oca\u00f1a told the Philippine News Agency.<\/p>\n
The hub will provide data and advisories by offering site-specific crop advisories, weather forecasts, and pest or disease alerts to farmers; train farmers, local government units, and stakeholders on using smart agriculture tools, including drones for data collection.<\/p>\n
The facility will also localize technology by adapting national SARAI technologies like SPIDTECH (Smarter Pest Identification Technology), WAISS (Water Balance-Assisted Irrigation Scheduling System) and AWS (Automatic Weather System).<\/p>\n
SPIDTECH features an insect pest and disease library, which acts as a comprehensive digital reference. It includes detailed information on pest and disease symptoms, life stages, management practices, and other relevant data.<\/p>\n
WAISS is a technology that notifies farmers if the soil moisture content in their farm is nearing a critical level. It can advise farmers on when to start irrigating their crops, how long it will take, when to stop, and when to start again.<\/p>\n
AWS is a device that provides real-time weather monitoring and uses site-specific historical data for crop modeling and forecasting.<\/p>\n
Project SARAI is an action-research program, funded by the DOST\u2013Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development, working towards reducing climate risks by providing agricultural stakeholders with site-specific crop advisories.<\/p>\n
The priority crops include rice, corn, banana, coconut, coffee, cacao, sugarcane, soybean and tomato. (PNA)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The new hub is designed to help farmers anticipate weather shifts, pest risks, and irrigation needs more accurately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology"],"zyndk8_nxtgen_metadata":{"nxtgen_comments":[{"1508":"SPIDTECH sounds very useful for pest management\r","1509":"climate risks are real \ud83c\udf0d kaya kailangan ng ganitong tools\r","1510":"diversified crops mean diversified income \ud83d\udcbc\r"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greeninc.ph\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}