A Day with Pigs

Our head office picked one of our bank's clients to be featured in our international annual report. This client is a multi-millionnaire pig farm owner, and he's getting richer by utilizing pig poop for electricity! Biogas at its best. As one of our posters say, did you know that garbage can pay your bills? (In this case, poop will pay your bills!) This farm owner uses his methane to power his whole farm and uses Meralco only as backup.

Quick note on what our company does: we help commercial banks understand energy efficiency and renewable energy projects so they can lend money to companies who want to "go green" and also save money in the process. (I think that's as simple as I can get) I usually do our marketing materials, presentations, case studies, awareness partnerships, and most of the time also keep track of the loans and our program's development impact (greenhouse gas emissions, energy savings, etc..)

Anyway, our company sent a New York-based photographer to do the pig shoot. Since I am the local contact person, I had to arrange for the shoot. I missed going on trips like this! I used to have lots of fun doing our AFI shoots before. The farm was based in Bulacan and I was quite starstruck with our photographer because he's the type that wins New York photography awards and shoots for NatGeo Adventure magazines. The past 3o days he has been shooting around the world in countries like Yemen, Uganda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India... whew. I had to remind him what country he was in!

It was a tiring day and my boss kept on reminding me that I was pregnant (he finally got tired of it and decided to stay under the shade and not follow us around) . But it was great being "award-winning photographer's" assistant even for just a day. I told him that I once dreamt of being an employee of National Geographic even if it was just for lugging camera equipment around. He used a Canon EOS 5D with a multitude of lenses. I got to hold a Canon G11 to do some video and some "supplementary" shots.

The farm owner was so accommodating and pleasant, that it as hard to believe that he was a multi-millionnaire. He still keeps his relationship with the bank even if he doesn't need financing anymore. He now pays for his investments in cash. It feels really great to be part of an organization which helps create opportunities for small businesses!

I look forward to developing more success stories like his. Sorry I can't post photos until the annual report comes out!