Our Story
A Farm Rooted in Three Decades of Care
A stone's throw from where Davaoeños draw their drinking water, and ringed by sprawling pineapple and banana plantations, Flow Forest Farm rises like an oasis, its five L-shaped hectares teeming with birds, bees, hornets, wasps, dragonflies, fireflies, snakes, and spiders that have nowhere else to go. When Arnold Vandenbroeck and Norma Javellana took root here in the 1990s, they planted with purpose: Philippine native trees on a massive scale to protect and preserve the Panigan-Tamugan watershed, Davao City's source of drinking water. What began as family land has become one of Mindanao's quiet living experiments in regenerative agriculture and intentional community.
The farm carries the spirit of SIGE, Sustaining Intergenerational Equity, a name that says exactly what the land is for: to leave a legacy by planting a forest farm seven generations of Davaoeños can still enjoy. Here, Arnold and Norma showed the bantay bukid how agroforestry and syntropic farming can succeed, and built a native tree nursery whose seedlings reforest riverbanks and denuded slopes. Today, their daughter, Maya Flaminda Vandenbroeck, stewards the land alongside Martin Dulang, an Ata farmer from Paquibato. They are focused on increasing the land's biodiversity for the various farming, natural-building, team-building, and wellness workshops and retreats, because rustic, natural environments are where the most profound healing, learning, unlearning, and connecting happen.
200
Coconut trees
168
Mangosteen trees
7
Banana varieties
50
Documented bird species
