From the farm to the table: food couldn’t get fresher than this. That’s what Egay’s Farm Restaurant of Bohol is proud of.
Owners Egay Escalona and wife Malou have been tending a farm since 2006 and opened the restaurant eight years later. They serve dishes cooked with ingredients sourced from their farm in Dauis, Panglao.
“We want to give our customers healthier alternatives to the usual fast-food chain offerings,” Escalona says, echoing the farm-to-table concept, which promotes local food using fresh, locally sourced ingredients. The concept also helps spur the local economy.
A boost to their business is knowledge of the latest technology. Malou banks on social media to spread the word about their restaurant and the benefits of organic food. She posts pictures of the restaurant’s dishes on their official Facebook page; she also gets orders online.
Malou recently shared their experiences with participants of a training of the Digital Farmers Program (DFP) of Smart Communications, the Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Training Institute and Probe Media Foundation.
Through DFP, youth volunteers are engaged in a three-course sequence focusing on acquainting, capacitating, and empowering small-holder farmers with basic digital tools and technologies, particularly social media, climate and weather monitoring applications, and e-Farming, among others.
Moreover, the program intends to harness the high technology-adaptability skills of the youth in actively on-boarding farmers into the digital space, and consequently, establishing a solid channel of idea-exchange from using modern agricultural technologies to discovering old-age farming traditions passed down through generations.
DFP hopes to produce various agricultural content based on the wisdom and practices of farmers, which can be uploaded and shared in various information and communications technology platforms, explained Darwin F. Flores, Vice President for Community Partnerships at Smart.
Egay’s is best known for roasted native chicken, goat caldereta, papait (bitter leaf) salad, crispy fried and duck adobo, fried pugo (quail), fried rabbit, grilled and fried turkey.
Also popular are the fresh herbal drinks such as Blue Ternatea Juice and Insulin Juice, which use ingredients freshly extracted from herbal plants grown in the farm. Diners get optimum health benefits of organic food and drinks.
“It is an advantage when you know how to use your mobile phones and social media sites,” Malou told training participants.
The growing demand for organic agricultural products inspired her and her husband to go into the farm-to-table business in 2014.
They also researched on and developed a fertilizer formula made from 100% organic ingredients. “The mix is more effective compared to the commercial ones that use pesticides and other chemicals,” Malou said.
“Combined with fast data connectivity, knowledge on the latest technology will definitely help us ‘agri-preneurs’ in our business,” she added.