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

News: another type of Composting using Bacteria , was more faster
Coz Bacteria double X2 every 20min

VS

Two pounds of worms, approximately 2000 of them, will eat one pound of compost every 48 hours

some Pic during My Cameron Study Trip

[attachmentid=442809]
[attachmentid=442810]
[attachmentid=442811]
[attachmentid=442812]
[attachmentid=442827]
[attachmentid=442828]
[attachmentid=442829]
[attachmentid=442830]

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.

Mmm.... Just got back from Cameron Highlands. Was not very impressed with most of the farms. The only thing that really impressed me was how they managed to keep the hill zone farms functional despite the steepness of the slope. Oh, and also the orang asli village.

Interesting note about the rain borne disease part. Yet seeing how countries like Thailand, China, and Indon can produce high quality perishable produce with rain-feeding method tells somethings else... Well ya, they do use heavy amounts of chemicals, but that's what you get from the Green Revolution.

Strawberries... Not very true... Commercial trials have already shown success in cultivating strawberries in lowland areas. Kelantan has shown good results. Same thing with grapes. Almost anyone you ask would tell you grapes need to be cultivated under cooling weather, when in reality grapes has part of its cultivation origin traced to Egypt. I've grown both grapes and strawberries in Sepang on a hobby scale, and they have born good fruits. If anyone knows Sepang well enough, they would know how scorching hot it can be.

Speaking of the elevated bed/tray method, saw that too at Cameron. Vegetables looked really nice, but as bro Chinchillas pointed out, they really managed the inputs very well to get those results.

To me, I would be in favour of something like that. Not because of disease or anything like that, but more of control and management. It is far more easier and efficient to do quality control on your produce if done that way. Right from the start, you are delivering equal inputs to all your crops, assuming you're using crop of uniform profiles of course.