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Archive for September, 2008

Niche Marketing Paves Her Way in Iced Tea Business

In an industry where stiff competition prevails, a neophyte entrepreneur must know how to secure his share of market and keep business alive.

To 25-year old entrepreneur Janice Buenaventura of Malabon City, niche marketing has been the key to her successful iced tea business. Niche marketing, she said, is producing a good specifically for a certain market, where consumers are willing to pay for a premium price for that good.

“I opted for the niche market because I know I could not afford to compete with the bigger players,” she said, adding that these companies produce in large-scale basis which results in much cheaper price of their respective products.

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Posted on September 30th, 2008 under Entrepreneurs. Tags: , . Comments: None

Entrepreneur : He Started Farming at A Young Age

He has a very unusual name, Irlfe Masif Saavedra. But that’s not the only unusual thing about this 43-year-old fellow from Malaybalay City in Bukidnon. At 18 years old, while enrolled in a commerce course at Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro, he had the foresight of developing a 2.5 hectare farm that his parents inherited. He planted 200 mango trees from which he has been making as much as P1.5 million a year to this day.

Also quite remarkable is the fact that he keeps complete records of his farming activities. That way, he knows whether he is making money or not from his projects. The records could tell him, for instance, if it is better to shift to some other crop. With the advent of computers, record keeping and analysis of farming trends are so much easier now, making farming more flexible and profitable for people like Saavedra.

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Posted on September 30th, 2008 under Entrepreneurs. Tags: , , . Comments: None

Corn : This Accounting Graduate Finds a Niche in Farming

Crispina “Tayan” Leonocito of Carmen, North Cotabato, 44, was an accounting clerk at her town ’s local government unit before she joined her husband in Subic, Olangapo, Zambales where he was a naval architect at the U.S. Naval Base.

However, soon after the Americans returned the naval base to the Philippines she went back to Carmen where farming beckoned her interest when 4 hectares (ha) of corn land were mortgaged to her in 1992. With P40,000 borrowed from her brother-in-law, she started farming while at the same time engaging in small-scale farm financing, providing production loans to corn farmers.

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Posted on September 29th, 2008 under Corn/Maize, Entrepreneurs. Comments: 1

Pointers on Growing High-Value Finfishes

There’s a growing interest in growing high-value finfishes like seabass, pompano, mangrove snapper and lapu-lapu or grouper. These can be grown in seacages or in ponds. And the good news is that fingerlings are now available not from the wild but from the hatchery. Therefore, the fingerlings are available throughout the year.

Fingerlings can now be sourced from Finfish Hatcheries, Inc., a member of the Alcantara Group of Companies, based in Alabel, Sarangani province. The company also provides useful pointers in growing these high-priced species.

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Posted on September 29th, 2008 under Agri Tips, Aquaculture. Tags: , . Comments: None

Spanish Processor Interested to Buy Seaweed from RP

Hispanagar S.A. of Burgos, Spain, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of hydrocolloids, has, expressed interest in buying raw seaweed from the Philippines, mainly from Sitangkai, Tawi-tawi.

Jerry E. Pacturan, executive director of the Philippine Development Assistance Programme (PDAP) which is helping seaweed farmers in Sitangkai, has met with Hispanagar general manager Javier Fernandez and purchasing manager German Gonzalez in Spain who said that they would source seaweed from the country because of its high quality.

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Posted on September 29th, 2008 under Aquaculture. Tags: . Comments: None

The Fishpens and Cages of Laguna de Bay

Laguna De Bay or Laguna Lake is the country’s largest freshwater body with an area of 90,000 hectares. It serves as an important resource for, fisheries, transport, water supply, and catch basin for 14 cities and 47 towns in five provinces of Metro Manila and Southern Luzon.

Being a productive lake with an average depth of 2.8 meters and heavy nutrient input from surrounding areas, Laguna de Bay provided a total fisheries catch of 321,000 metric tons consisting of 25 percent of fishes and 75 percent of shrimps and mollusks to 17,000 fisherfolk who depended on it for subsistence and livelihood in the early `60s.

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Posted on September 29th, 2008 under Aquaculture. Tags: , . Comments: None

A Housing Material Made From Chicken Feathers

A forestry expert has found that chicken feathers can he recycled into a low-cost, lightweight, and decay-resistant composite panel for use as building material for housing and construction.

He is Dr. Menandro Acda, a professor in the University of the Philippines Los Banos College of Forestry and Natural Resources where he has been working on his project called “Recycling Waste Chicken Feathers for Low-cost Building Material” since last year. This project was one of the 2007 grantees under the Ford Conservation & Environmental Grants Program.

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Posted on September 28th, 2008 under Poultry, Special Report. Tags: , . Comments: None

Plant Cabbage with Tomato or Garlic to Reduce Insect Pest Damage

Cabbage Farmers may as well plant either tomato or garlic around their cabbage crop to reduce damages caused by diamondback moth (DBM), Hellula, cutworms, and other harmful insect pests. This practice is called companion planting.

Lucrecia Cocson and Lagrimas Flojo, researchers of the Mariano Marcos State University [MMSU] in Batac City, Ilocos Norte, found in a three year study that companion planting with tomato or garlic results in higher marketable yields and, hence, higher net income from cabbage.

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Posted on September 28th, 2008 under Vegetables. Tags: , , , , . Comments: None

500 Year Old Bittaog Tree

One tourist attraction in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte is a bittaog tree that has withstood the greed and wretchedness of man through the years. Now 500 years old, it amazes one to see that it has been spared from the wanton cutting down of large trees in Mindanao.

Its huge size alone is already an attraction to many visitors, as not so many people have still to see trees of a similar size, or just about it, in other places. Amazingly, the people in the locality have preserved the tree-the one and only of its kind in Cabadbaran. A marker has been constructed near the tree to indicate its importance to the people of Cabadbaran.

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Posted on September 28th, 2008 under Forest Trees. Tags: . Comments: None

Update on Cacao

The prospects for the sustainable development of the cacao industry, in the Philippines are becoming increasingly brighter, thanks to the Success Alliance program that was started some five years ago by the Cocoa Foundation of the Philippines and supported by grants from the US Department of Agriculture and other Sources. Overseeing its implementation is ADVI/VOCA, a US-based non-profit organization that’s engaged in community development in many parts of the world.

At the donors and investments forum in Quezon City last July 2, Edward F. David, president of CocoaPhil, said that the cacao development program is gaining steam fast. When the project was just starting, he said, cacao production was not a priority. It was not one of the high-value crops in the priority list of the Department of Agriculture. Now, however, David reports that the DA is throwing its all-out support to the program.

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Posted on September 28th, 2008 under Other Crops. Tags: . Comments: None

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