Bicol Farmers Are Planting Cassava Where Pili Trees Stood for 40 Years

In the foothills of Mayon, farmers are pulling out pili seedlings and putting cassava in the ground. The volcano has dusted three straight harvests in ash, and the math on a 40-year pili tree has stopped making sense.

Pili is Bicol's signature crop. The nuts go into pastries, oils, and the gift boxes tourists carry back to Manila. A mature tree can yield for decades, which is why families in Albay and Sorsogon treated pili groves as inheritance, not seasonal income.

That inheritance now sits under a layer of volcanic grit.

The ashfall problem nobody priced in

Mayon has been venting for years, and the ashfall pattern has shifted with the wind. Farmers in Camalig, Guinobatan, and Daraga report flowers dropping before they set, nuts coming out small and bitter, and buyers in Legazpi cutting prices on anything that looks gray on the shell.

Agricultural extension workers in the region have flagged repeated crop damage from ashfall and acid rain around the volcano. The Department of Agriculture's Bicol office has acknowledged losses across high-value crops, though compensation has lagged behind what farmers say they need to replant.

A pili tree that fails for three years is not a tree you nurse back. It is a tree you cut down.

Cassava forgives almost everything

Cassava is the opposite bet. It matures in six to ten months, tolerates poor soil, handles drought, and does not flinch at a thin coat of ash. Processors in the Visayas and Mindanao have been buying steadily for feed and starch, and a few local cooperatives in Bicol are now organizing pickup runs.

The trade-off is brutal. Cassava sells for a fraction of pili per kilo. A hectare that used to fund a child through college now funds a semester. Farmers who switch are not upgrading. They are surviving.

Some are hedging. They plant cassava between the surviving pili trees, keeping the old crop alive on the chance Mayon settles down. Others have given up the grove entirely and leased the cleared land to traders who want guaranteed cassava volume.

What gets lost when the trees come down

Pili processing in Bicol is a whole supply chain. Small bakeries, pasalubong shops, oil bottlers, and the women who hand-crack the nuts in barangay kitchens all sit downstream of the groves. Cassava does not feed any of them.

Local government units have floated replanting subsidies and crop insurance expansions, but farmers who have filed claims describe the same loop: long forms, slow assessments, partial payouts that arrive after the next harvest cycle has already failed. The Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation covers volcanic damage on paper. On the ground, the coverage runs thin.

The shift is already visible from the highway. Stretches of Albay that used to be pili canopy are now low cassava rows, planted by families who have watched the volcano too long to keep waiting on a good year.

A pili tree takes seven years before the first real harvest. The farmer planting cassava this June is telling you, in plain terms, that he does not believe Mayon will give him those seven years.