CON-GOERS WHO HAVE attended CONQuest 2023 may notice a stall where someone decided to dress up as the Cabbage Merchant from "Avatar: The Last Airbender."
It turns out that the stall is a Filipino non-government organization (NGO) known as Urban Farmers PH. Manning the stall is Francesco, the man who cosplayed as the Cabbage Merchant in CONQuest.
"So what we're doing here, we're an NGO and we're actually selling cabbages. The cabbages come from a farmer that we invited from Rizal. That's one of the missions of our NGO, is that we partner up with farmers from different places and give them access to markets like this that otherwise they won't have access," revealed Francesco in an exclusive with Spin.ph
And how did they end up contacting that farmer from Rizal? Francesco mentioned that the farmer has ties with one of the members of the NGO.
"So actually, there's a farmer that is a contact of one of our members of the NGO, their family is connected to this farmer in Upper Antipolo. Then they said, 'Hey, we have an event, would you like to sell your produce here?"
"And they were like, 'Okay, game."
From that arrangement comes an opportunity for these farmers. Francesco then explained how their operation works.
"We actually bought the produce first. What we earn from here, that's what we used to buy it from them. To support the NGO, we do have a cut then, a little cut, but we're all supporting each other."
"So instead of going through several layers of middlemen, we have an arrangement where you're actually directly supporting the farmer."
"By buying these cabbages and buying our merch here, you support these farmers and our organization and yeah, the proceeds also go to that farmer because we supported them with their cabbage. We bought this from them."

More than just helping farmers
While connecting with farmers and selling their produce is one of the main advocacies of the NGO, Francesco revealed that the org has other underlying purposes.
Urban Farmers PH encourages Filipinos to learn how to make their own produce.
"Other than connecting with farmers and selling their produce, we mainly teach people that you can grow your own food in the city."
"It's an important thing that you can grow your food in the city because that's an important thing to establish food security, to get people to appreciate the soil, especially here in the city, where people don't know where their food is coming from."
"In the food security aspect, all our produce, for example, these come from other places like in Benguet. Then any kind of break in that chain of transportation will lead to rising prices, right?," reflected Francesco.
But besides teaching the community how to farm, they also aspire to promote healthy eating habits.
"Another thing that we teach is appreciation for vegetables in eating healthy because we don't use any pesticides or chemical fertilizers, so it's naturally grown."
One of the main reasons for the advocacy on healthy diet habits stem from some the numbers he expressed.
"Did you know that Filipinos are the lowest vegetable eaters in Southeast Asia? Like the lowest mass of vegetables. So compared to the rest of Asia, which eats around 400 grams of vegetables every day, guess how much Filipinos eat? Only like 100," reiterated Francesco.
And it doesn't just end there as the NGO also has other important activities, centered on the welfare of workers.
"So we do have workshops in BGC where we teach people those skills and other than that, we have a volunteer program where we invite people to kind of like use their hands and do something good."
"At the same time, we also give opportunities to displaced workers and PWDs. In fact, the NGO started as a way to help displaced workers during the pandemic to earn money while they didn't have jobs," reflected Francesco.

Planting the seeds
While Urban Farmers' advocacy has echoed to the community, its success is centered on its building blocks.
The social enterprise managed to tap into the potential of the young generation, who were inspired by its vision. Francesco was among those who answered the call.
"I started in architecture first, but then I dropped out and then I did multimedia arts. What inspired me to do farming is that when I dropped out of architecture, and I spent four years in architecture, I noticed that like when architects want to call something green, they just slap a tree and some like bushes on it and call it green."
"I'm like, you know what, there's got to be more than this. So when I was on my sabbatical, I really went hard into like biology, plant biology and everything. I did aquaponics. So I've been doing aquaponics since 2016. Now I teach it."
And for Francesco to further spread the goodwill of Urban Farmers, he needed to make sure that he could connect the advocacy to the general audience, hence his decision to dress up as the Cabbage Merchant in CONQuest.
Were his attempts successful? The fact that Urban Farmers ran out of cabbages during CONQuest was a sign that the message was rightfully delivered.
"Actually, we ran out of cabbages. People bought the cabbages. Yeah, there's a full of cabbages. We ran out of cabbages. So I'm so glad that we ran out of cabbages. So it means people are interested. People want to participate," said Francesco.
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