Recently I came across a piece of news in Daily Express Sabah regarding some 3,000 got cheated up to RM25mil in vermiculture projects, wow. A few while ago, I read about victims from a crab farming investment using recycle water system suffered the same fate of losing their hard earned money.

The moral of the story is there is no free lunch under the sun.

One must remember that agriculture is not some get rich quick plan where you can multiply your investment with little time and effort. The purpose of agriculture as well as any other businesses is to meet demand, if there is no demand, where the bloody hell did you get your returns?

There is a value in vermiculture, but most of the investors has a very wrong concept of treating that as a money printing machine. Yea, rite, worms fetch RM400 monthly and they double the population every months, so can I think that I can get 1x2^11 of your investment back in a year? A thinking like that not only neglect the real growing situation(space, density, stress, sickness, food, care, etc), it also neglect the fact about market demand, who the hell want to spend RM400 on 1 kg of earthworm on regular basis or even RM20 on 1 kg of vermicompost? The farmers out there can barely afford the much cheaper yet expensive chemical fertilizer what are the changes they will spend big bucks on the luxury worm poo?

Furthermore, worm compost has very high N nutrient, but poor in P and K. You still need to put chemical PK.

3,000 cheated of RM25mil in worm-breeding projects

I admire your ambitious plan. You can refer many rose/strawberry farms in Cameron highland as example.

At a piece of land of only 3 acres, I have visited a vege farm in Cameron highland which also operated a steamboat restaurant. So the visitors can while having fresh picked vege steamboat meal, they can have fun and take picture in your farm.

I think this will be much feasible as all you need to do is to set up a farm, a kitchen, and dining area. Vege is fast growing you will be in business in no time! Of course, you can also sell frozen food should your customers do not plan to go vegetarian.

However your primary objective should be getting profitable by supplying produces to pasar borong before you can have any vision 2020, to get yourself a firm ground and get things running.

I am interested to know whats your plan is, do PM me should you made up your mind.

This post has been edited by rexis: Jan 15 2010, 09:36 AM

So what do you want to know?

Imho, it is for niche market like medical/cosmetic industry and then local leech farmers mostly make their profit by selling baby leeches to other investors like you.

But seriously, what do yo know and what do you want to find out?

Regarding the wormman story, everyone should see things logically. There is always a second opinion required.

I am not too sure about what the wormman involved, but logically, if there is something that is easy to breed, high production, fast to see results... in very short time you can expect to see that there will be same thing happening to the graph - from over demand to over supply.

With all the get-rich-quicker who promised/dreamed about sky high in one step around, you can pretty much kiss all the downstream industries goodbye because all focused on quick cash.

Vermiculture is not some get-rich-quick tools to start with, it has some environmental protection, sustainability and nutrient recycling benefit but people are miss using this excuse to make profit, therefore kill the business real quick.

There is no free lunch in this world, everything has its difficulty.

Has your friend started any leech farm? If so he might know more then me. If he is a hear-say, well, here is my limited understanding of this subject.

Of course you dont need any scale to "start" any leech farm, but were you able to gain any considerable output, that is another question.

Here are the economics I know about.

Factories who might want to buy your leeches: RM60/kg
Medical entities who might want to buy your leeches: 100s /kg

How many kg of leeches you can expect to rear on one particular fibre tank? Of course you need to have some kind of scale to be profitable at RM60 per kg of leeches rite? So now you thinks that the hospitals are willing to pay you RM500 per kg of leeches, remember, if each leeches is at 50g you gonna have 20 huge leeches in 1kg, which is a lot, how many tonnes you expect our local hospitals would consume in one day? Remember, if it is too expensive, and its easy to raise, and the hospital needs lots of them, they can always set up a leech department, since it was mentioned that it can start small above, and hospitals have all the mad labs and equipments.

Then, you would need live keli fish to feed your adult leeches, for their thirst of blood, and for the baby leeches, it is said to prey on small invertebrates like snails. In conclusion, you will always required live bait to feed them. Fresh feed is certainly cost more then processed food, and more hassle too.
(added: I read years ago that commercial leech farm pump fresh cow blood into cow intestine to feed lots of leeches all at once, so you have to think where you can get fresh cow blood and their intestines)

Last but not least, let's say you are able to raise and keep tonnes of them at your backyard, another very pressing issue is how to prevent them from escaping or swarm on you while you are sleeping... (at least earthworms are vegetarian)

Furthermore, another main issue is, as you have asked, what species? Upon each leech training, you will most likely required to purchase breeders from your trainer, at a much higher price then RM60. Hence this is where their income from.

But as I mentioned earlier, if your friend was already leech farming, he might be better informed them I am, hence you should refer to him.

This post has been edited by rexis: Feb 22 2010, 04:50 PM

Hello peeps, especially MJ and para, just to let you know I am still alive and kicking. Some updates about myself, I have landed on a comfort zone of my career and have decided to stick with it for a little while. If you are curious, I am in IT field.

Then there is this Agribusiness, which was recalled to me when I received a pm from someone querying me about this topic, which reminded me that there are always some adventurous young souls out there who never gave up dreaming for greater achievement, or simply feel that you are in a wrong pool of water.

I have not been involved in any agribusiness(and my agri magazines has became my bed frame), but I humbly believe that the core values of life lies within the same bucket. After a few years of struggling I have come to this conclusion of life, that in order to live a life of success, you must obtain 3 simple items: love something/someone, do something, hope something. Which is a summary of passion, initiative, and ultimately, the hope for a desired tomorrow.

You passion for agribusiness is just exactly the same as passion to any other business, it is to make your life meaningful, which means you are able to make something useful out of your limited life time. What is meaningful? It could be money, it could be just the love of nature, or you love mangoes very very much, or you love watching a swarm of insects feeding(i do), whatever it is you must have it, and it must be strong enough reason to motivate you, that it will make you feel burning from inside and out, in order to propel and lift off from your current confort zone, and into darkness of uncharted spaces.

But remember, do not go into something just because you hate some other thing, it is unlikely that something will work because of hate, Stevy and Billy dropped out of school not because they hate school or spent too much time on DOTA, it is because they believe that there are some other better things to do. Of course, nobody, ever, can tell you what you can or can not do.

Okay, I will pause my long winded old man talk for now.

Long life agribusiness thread

I am smelling argo-tourism here! LOL come'on peeps, any takers, RM150 per night is a HUGE bargain, none-alcoholic cordial included.