Saturday morning as I was preparing to cook our breakfast, I took fancy watching farmers busy on the field just directly beside my kitchen window. Hearing the engine of the tractor whose tires were buried on the mud makes me extra excited instead of infuriated. A common sight at this time of the season -farmers readying the fields for rice planting. Gone are the mighty beasts who helped plow the fields.
Carabaos have been replaced by this diesel-run engine. What happened to the beast of burden? If you may want to ask? I guess, not every farmer could afford to have a carabao. When its price for buying one can go as high as 15k. Not every farmer here can afford that. Thus, their financier (the farmer’s employer whose task is to shoulder all expenses incurred throughout the cropping season) hires tractor instead to hasten the work.
So, you might asked whether those people from afar were planting palay? Nope. Not yet. The field is well saturated with water, the tractor makes it easier for some insects living beneath the ground to come out….Yes, those peeps are catching insects…
What kind of insects? You may asked. When ” salagubang” (some kind of beetle) have already hibernated underground. Check out how people here in our place enjoyed salagubang recipes…
So, what kind of insect have they got this time? I lean over our fence and asked a teen to give me one. Just one because I knew the insects have sharp teeth 
Have he got more? The tractor had not dig up the soil much than a carabao can do. He said. So, he got only a handful. Enough to turn it into adobo… YES, ADOBO
Time to show your face, little insect…
Please don’t bit me off
Now, he’s turning his back on me Have the courage to face the camera and tell me what are you called
“Jiminy Cricket”? Close.
Yes. It is a mole cricket. They spend half of their life buried underground. The foremost reason why the teenage boy must have gotten less of the insects than what he is expected is because the crickets must have been displaced or are decreasing in numbers because of habitat destruction. Pesticides and fertilizers used in the farms have greatly improved farmers’ crops, yet, they greatly contributed to reducing biodiversity.
Personally, I wanna see other generations to experience seeing what Mother Nature has graciously bestowed in us. I wanna see more salagubangs which usually comes out in May, and those mole crickets – for me to marvel at.
As a dish? Which is very popular here -adobong susuhong, pritong susuhong, as the locals call it…same with other exotic foods which comes from the fields – talangka, palaka, ahas, dagang bukid…
The husband and my teen son swears salagabung is delicious and the daughter had tried eating snake at their summer encampment to Mt. Bintuod, a series of peaks off the southern tip of Nueva Vizcaya.
Ahh, not yet my time to try any of those I have yet to order a pitcher full of courage.
