Characters of conservative farming system in the Philippines highland

Recently, a demand of the temperate vegetables has rapidly increased by the improvement in the national income in the Philippines. However, the main producing district is limited in highland mountain areas due to the climate conditions. Therefore, rapid develops are found of farm lands in highland mountain areas. In these main producing districts, cultivation of temperate vegetables has made in the conservative farming system by the traditional cultivation method depending on the soil fertility. In addition, deforestation, soil productivity involution, soil erosion and dependence on agricultural chemical control have caused environment disruptions in these areas. Based on the abovementioned background, the main objective of this study is to clarify characters of the temperate vegetables production by the conservative farming system using the quantitative analysis. The first problem is to estimate the Biological and Chemical technology production function. The second problem is to clarify the relationship between the land condition index as soil fertility and soil erosion under the Biological and Chemical technology differences. The results of this analysis are summarized as follows. 1)Biological and Chemical technology process is a condition of the diminishing returns to scale. The technology process intensively utilizes the current capital in the farm with a low soil fertility. Therefore, contribution to the current capital is not high. 2)Farmers have recognized the problems on the land conditions such as soil erosion and soil fertility as a given conditions. Under such situation, in the highland mountain areas the high productivity has been realized by land saving production technology. 3)In the future, introduction of the environmental preservation farming system are necessary for the sustainable development of the temperate vegetables production.