LMAO, i doubt people will rent a room to me once they find out their "housemates" are actually a gang of worms.

Rear it as pet, the expand. Sound easy, but unproven market. Potential from zero to space.

hello hello saudara dan saudari... cough cough

I am back to office and seeing so many passion flooding around this thread, certainly my mind is opened wider as a result of the gathering, I feel like there is unlimited issue to discuss about, the only constrain is time and nando's(they're closing shop). And I feel like never like before the feeling of confidence in agriculture, no doubt, agriculture is business, but you have to think big to do big business for sure.

We hv discussed much during the gathering, but this is limited to the agriculture side, Para have the aquaculture side.

Topics we discussed into is
- potential returns of agriculture(chili as example, a bit exaggerated, will post a more realistic example)
- possible risks in farming
- add value to agri product - processing
- why organic farming?
- imported agri products vs local
- the importance of niche market

Special presentation by KW about
- how does Jatropha fruit looks like
- algae oil(as future energy crop)
- food supply and demand(world/china)

QnA
- What should we do if a farm struck by disease? Is that mean the farm gone forever? (required further discussion)

I am sure I have missed out something, all the main speakers please add in.

Lets quote some words from Para



(edit add: And its because of us!)

This post has been edited by rexis: Apr 7 2008, 09:46 AM

Yes, rearing egg duck is profitable, especially when u process them into salted duck egg, longer shelf life, high price. And there is demand.

There is an issue of the AgriWorld talk about a guy who rear ducks.

----

1 hectare hv 100 trees, 12 acres = 4.8 hectare, so 480 trees.

But again, planting this kind of crop is not going to be easy for fresh starter, you have to wait for at least 5 years for the tree to kick in peak production. How u survive in that 5 years?

---

Added on April 7, 2008, 6:27 pm
Farm disease and sickness control

------

Behind the beautiful halo of agriculture, the whooping estimated return figures, the beautiful plants and handsome truck lots of harvest, there is always the dark side, like my dad say, UK sound great, but when he went to London, he feel like crying.

So one of the devil that is eating up your nett profit is plant disease and sickness. Note that I do not mean pest here - at least you can see those nasty caterpillars, fruit flies and mites eating up your precious harvest and you can have some clue on what is causing your loss and act accordingly. Sometimes, your plant is showing really strange behavior, nothing on it but they just doesn't looks healthy, or fruit dropping, or some part just rotten, or the whole thing just died mysteriously.

There is a few thing you should check when you facing similar issue, the soil, the water, the weather, the nutrient and the plant itself as well as study the history of your land and the surrounding.

the first one is soil:
have you did any lab test on your soil(which should be done BEFORE you plant anything)? Were your plants have sufficient nutrient? Is the soil suitable? Is the pH level correct?

water:
where did you got your water from? Is it from a steam passing thru some other farm/facility? Or is it ground water?

the weather:
Is the crop burnt by sunlight? Is any shade netting required? Is it raining season? Is there any flooding or water logging?

the nutrient:
Are you using the correct fertilizer? For organic fertilizer, are your fertilizer properly fermented? Could your organic fertilizer carrying disease? Did you supplement the correct micronutrient? Or did you over fertilized your crop?

the plant:
Get samples of sick plants and send for lab test, or show to fertilizer/seed supplier, they will have a clue. Is the plant sick due to environment? Or is it a kind of virus/fungus?

The land:
What is the land being used for previously? Why the previous owner stop his business? Is it a virgin land? Is there any farm nearby that can transfer the disease?

The important thing to work out a farm is you must monitor your farm properly, dont let your worker do all your job. Whenever you spotted anything suspicious, act immediately. Like instantly dig out the entire plant and burn it, or immediately consult a professional regarding your findings.

Also, do not over stress your land. Let it rest after a cycle. As in nature, every life form suppress each other to reach a perfect balance. If we want to balance things up, the land need to take a break. Also, do crop rotation, switch with different crop. For example, if a land has planted sweetcorn for too long, a lot of pest and disease that adapted to attack sweetcorn will start to settle down in that land. If we switch to say, cassava, sweetcorn pest will die due to lack of food.

Farming is not as easy as just lay the seeds and wait.

The above is a very general on where to look into whenever your farm is stuck by a sickness and you losing harvest. There are details which I yet to have time to look into. I am not going to go into anatomy of the virus etc etc, those you have to go and read agri text book.

This post has been edited by rexis: Apr 7 2008, 06:38 PM

KW, i think theres a local banana plantation that use light aeroplane to spray pesticide.

Welcome on board, hopefully you find the informations useful. Feel free to shooting question as there will be sifu here willing to give comments.

If I have RM300,000 then seriously there will be lots more better choice available. I would go into vegetable production, with RM300k i can utilize biotech and greenhouse and fertigation and produce high quality products.

Anyhow, vermiculture has yet to set firm in local market. But the potential is there, the next thing is up to how you establish it.

When one doing a business, you always need to do marketing for your own business, same with farming, or vermiculture. I mean, how do you sell your products? In the case, vermicompost as organic fertilizer. First you identify your customers, then, you approach them and make them aware of your product, then, close sales. It is a marketing issue here.

So who would need vermicompost here? Firstly, home gardeners, we have plenty of people around here that owns a garden, and they willing to spend on something that make their garden healthy. Then, it is the organic farmers, they will usually require larger supply compare to normal gardener. Basically the market pie of fertilizer is there, it is up to you to grab a slice from it.

-

And so, you would like to start small on vermiculture, there is very simple ways to start from:

- learn about vermiculture
- make worm bins
- buy worms
- grow your worms
- expand and harvest
- market your harvest

Where do you learn about vermiculture? To success, you have to master your skill, and properly done your homework. Internet has tons of vermiculture resources and there are a community of vermiculture over the internet, they are more then willing to share what they know. Lately, I just find out that there are local vermiculture operators that organize training course for vermiculture.

How much do we need to make worm bins? You can do it as cheap as less then RM30 rather then RM300k. Very very easy, get a plastic container(Jaya Jusco sell less then RM15 for a big one, Carefour might goes lower, you can even use those cheap plastic dustbin) and fill it with water soaked shredded old newspaper(almost cost nothing). Drill ventilation holes all over the lid. Then the bin is ready to go and just wait for you to put in the worms!

You can get your first batch of worms from a local vermiculture farm, usually people find this challenging a few years back because nobody is doing vermiculture locally in Malaysia, but now, there is a few supplier available and it is possible to purchase compost worm directly, it goes like RM300-400 per kg of fresh and lively earthworms. OR, just dig some garden worm and try them out, this is usually recommended by official.

About how to grow your worms, you can try googling around the internet, I am sure there is plenty of guidelines about how and what you should or should not feed your earthworms, and how to keep them happy and healthy. Seriously, from internet, you can find much much more info about breeding earthworm then growing oil palm. Basically you do not need to spend much in feeding your earthworm, as they eat organic waaste.

After your worms settle down, and your worm colony growing, and you have meaningful scale(like you can produce 100 package of compost monthly), its time for you to harvest and expand. Harvest and bag your compost, and this will be your product, get more worm bin ready so that you can accommodate more worms and therefore your future harvest will increase.

Market your harvest! Make money from it. You can do direct selling to your neighbour, or have a visit on the local grocery shop see if they interested to put it in their shop, for the commercial prospect like farmers or even plantations, you need to have higher scale and volume(like 1 tons per week production).

-

This is just a plain guidelines, for the details, each of them can expand into a full article.
(i got two supplier for earthworm if u interested, u can PM me, I want to buy, but not 1kg tat much, perhaps we can share. But not now, I yet to hv time to establish things)

You are most welcomed.

An organic farmer! It is such an honor to have you here. Feel free to post around here.

About the the ripeness of the vermicompost, it is generally described as "dark and odorless or earthy smell", that means it is ready. IMHO, to be sure, you can keep the harvested compost for a period, while make sure no decomposing occur(like internal temperature change, etc, just like making regular compost).

True, local garden worms, not to say they cant do it, people just say that they cant do it fast enough, while I have yet to make any real life comparison with local and tiger worm. I have tried to keep garden soil worm(dig them out and make them a home) and they hv survived in captivity(worm bin) for more then six months, they grew bigger size and they produced capsules. In the process, some dying occurred but those who survived, is going to do very well. The worms are released to the wild due to complaints.

I am very interested how tiger worm can do better then that.

Why? To stimulate your appetite?

Here is some good banner to put in your siggy thou

Oh! That is something new for me! Feed composted stuff to earthworms.

Yeah, like MJ mentioned, earthworms go for rotten stuff first, as they do not hv the teeth to chew them up.

That would explain why the hell did my cabbage stayed in the worm bin for one whole week before i remove it

Yeah, there is another agri magazine recommend to compost with bacteria too rather with worms. I was trying to find out what is the difference between regular compost and worm compost(rather then having a bit of extra protein supply).

I have read about a method to cultivate vegetable on elevated bed/tray, the method is similar to the strawberry farms in cameron highland, but they put compost on the tray and even practice crop rotation on the elevated compost. It is said that by keeping away from the soil, you can prevent a number of diseases.

A friend has told me about a farmer from Kelantan "gantung" all his chili up, coz to prevent soil borne disease.

Replying to KW's thread located here in the investment forum.

Izzit? Never realized Tawau Cocoa so famous, but their products sure are good stuff, try if you can find some Hoko 3in1 coco drink in the supermarket, they pwned milo inside out in taste.

I do know agriculture play a great part in contributing to Tawau economy, most of them cash crops(Oil palm and Cocoa, etc), vegetable and fruit farmers do not have too many local demand, the population are quite low in Sabah.

Was classmate to the daughters from the family who operate the largest cocoa plantation and some oil palm plantation during highschool.

This post has been edited by rexis: Apr 16 2008, 11:55 AM

Hi there, I myself is also in the realm of IT, it is indeed good to take action for good purpose. But it is very important to do your homework. Keeping worm not as easy as it sound like, if you overfed the worm, you will find them overran you fruit fly maggots. And there is no hard and fast rules for breeding worms.

I am encouraging agriculture for the purpose of better quality and more rewarding life. Remember not too spend too much time in beating up dungeon monsters leveling all day once you decide to start any business, expect yourself to work 2x harder when running your own business.

Fyi, Hoko is made in Tawau, and I think its quite good.

Just that they are more focusing in export market rather then doing much in local market. This is reasonable because Tawau has a low demand due to low population compare to city.

And hence thats why the cocoa estate company in Tawau is making billions.

We have plenty of world class products here in Malaysia, another example is in Sibu, Shell has a first in the world and once the largest in the world(now should be replaced by some middle east country) natural gas processing plant that produce liquid fuel with natural gas(GTL).

Not like some high profile white elephants, the best things work quietly in the background.

Your thought and feeling make a real sense. It is indeed true that being able to earn enough is the real meat of surviving in this cruel world. People dont give a damn at how smart you able to design a network system, or how well you understand OOP in programming. Your value is represented by a set of numbers.

By working for others
- your work is your responsibility, nobody appreciate anything.
- your boss/company/stupid top management decide how much you will be earning.
- you depended on your pity salary, no matter how high is it.
- the company will try to get rid of you once they think you are not productive enough.
- no matter how you whine for low pay or high fuel cost, your boss will not give you a damn.

By venturing in agribusiness
- you start taking charge of your life, including all the risk, potential, meeting national demand and contribute directly to economy.
- it is up to you to decide and plan how much you want to expand and earn.
- you can plan out your crops to control when and how much you earn.
- you can work until 110 years old and you modernize you farm by buying tractors.
- as a raw material producer, you gain more from rising cost...

These are IMHO, but I seriously thought that by getting salary from your company, is nearly as good as getting pocket money under the care of your parent.

No i dont have experience in mushroom farm, I am more like experienced with eating them

However, growing mushroom is surprisingly easy. In the early days, a mushroom grower start up from his backyard and now operating a mushroom factory which chunk out tons of mushroom weekly. Theres also another example that a women who operated a mushroom factory(aka mushroom hut) and gain considerable success, with business volumes worth millions annually. These are the success stories.

The ingredients to grow mushroom
- growing material
- mushroom mycelium
- plastic bag
- pressure cooker
Fill plastic bags with growing material, disinfect the stuff in the pressure cooker, and then apply mycelium and keep it in a dark and cool warehouse and wait for mushroom. Of course, there are details like housekeeping, extend harvesting period, etc.

Typical return from a bag of growing material is about 200-300 grams of mushroom over 4 months, but another mushroom grower is reported being able to gather up to 1kg of mushroom over 6 months with better growing material and mushroom hut moisture and temperature control.

Wholesale price of oyster mushroom is about RM5.50-6.00, and supermarket sell them for about RMm8.00.

-

Growing Material

They mainly consist of agricultural, timber, forestry waste products, such as saw dust, rice straw, rice bran, etc. In a typical oyster mushroom growing bag, there are about 90% of saw dust and 10% of rice bran, different origin of waste material contain different nutrition value(for mushroom)and could yield different result, some might work better then the other. I have read about a mushroom grower try mix corn flour in the bag and yield a slightly different taste mushroom.

Do note that since mushroom quality is directly influenced by the growing material, therefore any chemical, heavy metal residue on the planting material will directly pollute your mushroom.

You can either choose to mix your own growing material as well as bag, sterilize, plant the mushroom yourself, which required a large pressure cooker for this purpose as well as large mixer machine to stir up the materials. Its a lot of work and required plenty of capital.

Or you can purchase a sterilized mushroom bag from a mushroom grower/factory. All you need is a ventilated room with water sprayer fans to keep them.

Mycelium

Mycelium is the true body of mushroom, something like a root of a plant, but its not a root. You can choose to purchase mycelium of certain mushroom(oyster, straw, wood ear, ganoderma, etc)

It is possible to breed mycelium yourself but you required a lab to do so. Its tough to isolate a pure mycelium without being contaminated by wild fungus.

Plastic bags and pressure cooker

Plastic bags as well as a special cap(or simply a ring to hold an opening on the bag is being used to hold the planting material, while pressure cooker is important for wiping out all the rest of the alien spores and fungus so that nothing else will disturb your mushroom.

PS: dedicated discussion thread here

This post has been edited by rexis: Apr 22 2008, 05:39 PM

jcvstlys, the guide is quite brief, there are more details about what nutrient can be used for increase production, humidity and temperature control, how to clone and breed new breed, etc etc etc. The magazine Today Agriculture sometimes organize mushroom training course but its been more then 2 months since I read the magazine - not sure are they still operating. I know there is one mushroom farm that sometimes organize training course for whoever interested. And I am quite sure that whoever selling any mushroom substrate to you are willing to guide you as well.

Or since the method is pretty straight forward, you can choose to learn the details by doing it I personally hv tried purchased some oyster mushroom from hypermarket and successfully(pure white silky thread) isolated some mycelium on a glass of jelly, all according to the guides found in the internet. Never planted the mycelium on any substrate thou, my apartment really too small for a mushroom hut.

Should you need any mushroom contacts, I can try dig dig my library.

FYI,
1 bushel of wheat is 60 lb or 27.2kg
1 bushel of shelled corn is 56 lb or 25.4kg

So,
US$9.45/bushel of wheat = US$347.43/tonne
US$4.66/bushel of corn = US$183.46/tonne

Did I get the figure wrong? I recalled that a few months back corn price was at over RM1000 per ton?

I can share with you but that is only when I get my place ready, that is after next month I plan to rent another cheap apartment or room.

What kind of worm farming you are talking about?

Be it earthworm, mealworm, maggot, etc. The start up could be a high school budget science project to hundreds thousands commercial scale project.

If you ask me about the minimal cost for startup, it can be well below RM1000 or even below RM100.

But before you venture into any project, it is important to identify the market first. Who you gonna sell the worms to?

I am not with my small library now... if u can wait, remind me early next month

Nice to have another bright fella to join the party, please do hang around as we will hv updates from time to time.

This post has been edited by rexis: May 14 2008, 02:03 AM

200 grams earthworms... you might as well just go and catch them ^^ your garden earthworm will work too. I has personally did it, and i see them eating my shredded office paper like mad, I know that because after one day the garden earthworms moved into my worm bin, i seen lots of bite size(worm bite size) paper bit all over the worm bin, it means that they starting to eat my bedding as soon as them moved in!

What is in your mind to to earthworm farming aka vermiculture? for the worm or for the compost?

I saw a local shop selling worm compost for RM6 per 1/2 kg package O.o expensive! Thanks to these people who pioneer into the market, next time when we established our worm farm and we can start selling out compost at discounted price!

This post has been edited by rexis: May 24 2008, 11:27 AM

That is they being particular with the "red worm".

Redworms, either Eisenia foetida or Lumbricus rubellus, neither of them are native worms of malaysia, hence most likely you cant find them in your garden. What i am trying to say is, you can use your garden worm, ie, normal regular common cacing, for your worm box too.

Now.... tell me how can I find this farmer ^^

Local worms are recommended because as a "bumiputera"(native) cacing:
- it will not cause any ecological issue like displacing native earthworm
- it will adapt to the local climate
- locally available
also:
- you can bring them up like red worms, market them as a more capable earthworm and get a quick buck from early emerging market.