African Night Crawlers for organic crops pushed

by Alma Buelva

Share this:

By: ERWIN G. BELEO

SAN FERNANDO CITY, La Union – The wriggly earthworms used for fishing baits are now fast becoming organic crop fertilizers and are even being processed into pesticide spray.

“The excrement of these worms is a good fertilizer as it also enriches the soil quality,” Wilfredo Abengona, in-charge of vermiculture of the San Fernando City Agriculture Office, one of those who is sternly pushing for vermicomposting, a process in which one produces organic fertilizer and pesticide spray using biodegradable materials and even mixed with the excrement of earthworms (vermicast), particularly the African night crawler (ANC).

African night crawlers are now pushed for vermicomposting to promote better, healthier organic crops.

Members of City Councilor Paolo Ortega’s Governance Trailblazing Project team chose vermi-composting as their focal point to promote its importance and to push for farmers and backyard gardeners to turn organic.

Abengona explained that organic vermicomposting materials are made out of 50 percent animal manure, particularly from cows, goats and horses (except chicken), mixed with 50 percent banana peelings or leaves, grasses, rice hays, kitchen droppings and other biodegradable materials.

It was learned that the vermicompost or the vermicast, when used as fertilizer in farms, gardens plant nurseries, and even landscaping, improves the physical structure of the soil which becomes enriched with micro-organisms like enzymes that attracts deep-burrowing earthworms already in the soil. It also improves the soil’s water-holding capacity.

The vermicompost is ready to “harvest” in 30 to 40 days, or even extended to another 14 days to allow the worms’ eggs to hatch so that they would proliferate. Abengona said the more worms in plants, the more nutrients they would absorb on the soil.

In the case of vegetables, “all we have to do is to put the mixtures or the worm in the bored hole,” he said.

Out of the vermi compost, a fertilizer/pesticide spray called the vermitea is formulated. One would only mix a part of vermicompost, molasses, and water; ferment it for 48 hours to get a foliar fertilizer and pesticide spray.

In its testing stage, Abengona said barangays Bangbangolan and Bato have been planted with eggplants and tomatoes using vermicompost. The produce, he said are “heavier” than usual, which means, they fruits have more flesh even if they are smaller in size.

He clarified that eggplants which are longer in size are lighter in weight. “This is a manifestation of the vermicompost or organic fertilizer in effect on standing crops.”

For your retirement and other real estate needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com.

Crocodile lechon in Agri Magazine

by Zac Sarian

Share this:

• 

UPDATE ON RUBBER FARMING — Dr. Pablito P. Pamplona has reported in the December issue of Agriculture Magazine that new rubber clones show high yield potential and early production. For instance, trees of PB 350 and RRIM 2025 reached tapping size at four years, much earlier than RRIM 600 and PB 260 which need 5.5 years to attain tapping size. Additionally, Dr. Pamplona cites intercropping of cash crops during the first three years of the plantation as a source of income for the farmers while waiting for the trees to be ready for tapping. The crops may include peanut in the first year, corn in the second year and lakatan or latundan banana in the third year. Photo shows peanuts intercropped with one-year-old rubber trees.

Did you know that crocodile lechon is now available in the Philippines?

Buy the December 2013 issue of Agriculture Magazine and read about Coral Agri-Venture Farm, Inc. (CAVFI) that has 15,000 crocodiles in its farm in Teresa, Rizal. The story is written by our regular contributor, Pete Samonte.

While the main product of the company is crocodile skin which it exports abroad, CAFVI is now also focusing on developing gourmet food products, including crocodile lechon.

The other crocodile meat products are Dundee hotdog, burger patties, sisig, Bicol express, crispy pata, tocino, tapa and other preparations.

ORGANIC FERTILIZER MANUFACTURER – Another inspiring story you will read is about Alfredo Gonzales of Concepcion, Tarlac, who plants sugarcane on 300 hectares.

Thanks to the excessively high cost of urea a few years ago, Gonzales was forced to turn to making organic fertilizer for his own use as well as for other planters. Now, he manufactures no less than 1,000 sacks of organic fertilizer a day using as raw material sugar milling wastes, poultry and hog manure which he enriches with his own beneficial microorganisms.

His operation is highly mechanized so that the resulting products are very uniform in quality. The feature story is also written by Pete Samonte.

PAPAYA KING – Another inspiring story is that of Carmelo ‘Milo’ Ramos of Brgy. Soledad in San Pablo City. Milo was a former OFW who served for about 10 years in a rescue ship that sailed around the world tasked with rescuing vessels in distress.

He gave up his well-paying job as a seaman to become a farmer in his native barangay because he could not forget what an old lady fortune teller told him when he was a small boy. The fortune teller told him that his fortune was in the farm and not at sea.

When he went back to his barrio, he immediately planted rambutan in the family farm which he intercropped with Sinta papaya. The papaya was very profitable so that since 1999 he has always planted papaya in the family farm as well as in rented land.

Today he has 18,000 papaya trees planted in three locations. His biggest plantation is located near where he lives, planted to 12,000 Sinta, Red Lady and Red Royale varieties. Every week, he harvests an average of 8 tons from his biggest plantation most of which are sold to a big trader at P15 per kilo.

Now you see, sometimes fortune tellers are also right. Right in the case of Carmelo Ramos.

For your retirement and other real estate needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com.

Investing in stocks or stock funds

By Randell Tiongson

12:03 am | Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014

 145 1046 843

QUESTION: I am ready to start investing and I would like to invest in equities. Is it better to invest in stocks directly or through pooled stock funds like UITF or mutual funds? —Name withheld per request, asked via e-mail

Answer: As a financial and investment planner, we need to subscribe to the principle of suitability. Without sufficient information, it wouldn’t be prudent of me to categorically say one would be better than the other. The answer really depends on you—if you are knowledgeable enough to select your own stocks, size of funds, and if you have enough time for investing.

However, to help you make a more informed decision, let’s discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both types of investing.

On individual stocks

Advantages :

Control—Buying your stocks directly gives you control over what and when to buy or sell.

Residual income—If you buy a stock with a good dividend payout, then you don’t have to watch the price movement anymore. As long as the company is earning and declares dividends, you will get dividends.

Maximized returns—individual stocks that are growing may beat the market and can give you better-than-average returns. Jollibee beat the market last year, moving from P100-P170 while the entire market was down.

Potentially better returns—with proper selection and assuming that you are very good at selecting market performers, the growth of your own stock portfolio can outperform the stock market index and many stock funds.

Fees—buying your stocks directly from brokers usually means lower fees as fund managers charge a higher investment management fee compared to stock brokers.

Disadvantages :

Time-consuming—before investing, you should spend enough time thoroughly understanding how stock market investing works. You should also accumulate enough knowledge of both fundamental and technical analysis.  

Fundamental analysis means you must be able to read and understand financial reports of the companies you would like to invest in, the general condition of the industries and market trends to which these companies belong to, general knowledge of macroeconomics and even the management of the corporations you would like to own shares of, etc. 

Technical analysis will require you to constantly study charts on price averages, trading volumes and a multitude of technical market theories like Dow theory, Relative Strength Index, Elliott Wave theory and more. While fundamental and technical analysis is not rocket science, it takes considerable time for you to learn them properly. Enrolling in a class like Marvin Germo’s Stock Smarts is a good way to start.

Diversification—all investment professionals will always recommend you to diversify. No amount of study and good performance in the past will guarantee the performance of a particular stock in the future so having several and properly selected stocks is always a prudent thing to do. Unless you have a very big capital for investing, you will be limited to the variety of stocks you can carry in your portfolio.

On stock funds

Advantages :

Professional fund management—this is perhaps the biggest advantage of pooled funds like UITFs and mutual funds. There is a dedicated team of investment experts that looks at investment opportunities and is investing the money according to the investment objectives of the fund. It is common to see CFAs or Certified Financial Analysts leading or being part of these investment teams. Good fund managers are clinical and logical investors and are not easily swayed by emotions as compared to individual investors.

Capital requirements—most of pooled stock funds have low capital entry requirements. One can invest in a fund for as low as P 5,000 to P10,000, with other providers requiring a monthly contribution of as low as P1,000 per month.

Diversification—all stock funds carry well-diversified stocks in their portfolio, usually blue chip or premium stocks. Since these are pooled funds, there are economies of scale in place; fund managers will be able to purchase different shares. Proper diversification will ultimately result in reduced portfolio risk.

Disadvantages :

Fees—While not all stock funds charge the same range of fees, these fees are usually much more than broker fees as there are costs involved in managing funds. Some funds even charges entry and exit fees, which can reduce the returns of your investments. Some funds are being sold through agents and advisors and commissions would need to be paid to them.

Control—you have no say on which funds you want or don’t want in your fund as this is already delegated to the fund managers. You also can’t modify the weight of the stocks inside a stock fund as fund managers follow maximum exposure limits per stock to ensure proper risk management practices. Even if you want more PLDT or Jollibee shares in your portfolio, your fund will only have a limited exposure to said stocks, like 10 percent.

The answer to your question is dependent upon you knowing the pros and cons of individual stock investing or through a pooled equity or stock fund. If you are a new investor, I recommend you invest in a stock fund first and as you get to understand how the stock market works and develop your competency in investing, you may want to start investing in individual stocks.

Do not forget, whether investing in stocks by yourself or through a fund, it pays to invest first in investment education.

Join me, Marvin Germo, Marvin & Rose Fausto, Edric Mendoza, Jess Uy, Alvin Ang and other investment experts at the biggest investment conference of the year, the iCON 2014: It’s time we make investing for everyone! Presented by BPI and Sun Life. For more information, visit http://www.brandspeakasia.com/icon

Randell Tiongson, RFP is a speaker, columnist, author and personal finance advocate.

Attend our FREE personal finance talk on April 24, 7pm at PSE Ortigas by email info@rfp.ph or text <name><email><RFPinfo> at 0917-3464126

For your retirement and other real estate needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com.

Visiting chefs from Denmark get creative with ‘ube,’ ‘ buko,’ ‘calamansi,’ mangoes

By Micky Fenix
Philippine Daily Inquirer

 0 2 0

STEAMED diwal with sigarilyas

A good meal needs time to be digested in the mind.

It took a while for me to figure out what was learned from the dinner with two visiting chefs—Yannick van Aeken, former sous chef of Noma, and Louise Bannon, currently Noma pastry chef. (Noma in Denmark was ranked best restaurant in the world from 2010 to 2012 by the British magazine Restaurant; Noma’s chef, Rene Redzepi, is known for foraging the ingredients for his dishes.)

Chef Roby Goco of Cyma and his brother, Pio, took charge of setting up the venue for the dinner, inviting the guests, and sourcing the menu’s ingredients, most of them organic—the selling point of Roby’s other restaurant, Green Pastures at Shangri-La Plaza.

Nothing can be as fresh as foraged ingredients. But on unfamiliar grounds, the public market is the best place to do that. For Van Aeken, the kinds of ingredients in this country overwhelmed him. But why is it, he asked, that we have few vegetable dishes?

He knew that right away by just reading the menu wherever they ate. There are, he said, many chicken and pork dishes. I told him that I had asked myself that same question. But I also

OATS, brown rice and Nordic biscuit called kiziek on a bed of mashed ube

informed him that in Ilocos, people have more appreciation of vegetables and they cook it with simple means.

He and Bannon, however, went south to the Visayas and incorporated some of the ingredients found there into the dinner menu. The dinner guests couldn’t be kept out of the kitchen where Bannon was cutting mangoes for dessert. Both chefs said the fruits here were the best they’ve had. If they visited a month later, in May, Philippine mangoes are at their sweetest.

The mangoes for dessert came with coconut ice cream flavored with buko, calamansi, and mango juices. It was simple, and the ingredients were all that mattered.

Mix and match

That dinner reminded me of my family’s Sunday lunch after the husband goes to market. He always says that what he buys has already been cooked in his head. The apahap (sea bass) is steamed. The crabs are fried, then cooked in a Chinese ginger sauce. The salay-salay is prepared as kinilaw.

COCONUT ice cream with mangoes

Van Aeken and Bannon must have been thinking like my husband when they went through the wet market.

First bowl out of the kitchen had diwal (angel’s wings), always impressive if you know you can’t find this anywhere.  The shellfish was steamed, accompanied by sigarilyas (winged bean) with a hint of calamansi, vinegar and pickled shallots.

A thick sauce made of squash held mussels with ar-arosep (grape-like seaweed) and some chicharon. It was sweet and salty, with texture. It really says that you can mix and match varied ingredients, but you must also know how each ingredient contributes to the whole.

Next was a Japanese dish—a broth of dashi, a chef-perfect poached yolk, seaweed and daikon cubes, and malunggay (moringa) leaves still on their stems.

I wondered, when can we identify something as a truly Filipino dish?

Anyway, the succeeding menu item had mashed ube as the base, and over it were oats, organic brown rice, shallots and a Nordic biscuit called kiziek. Of all the dishes, I think this was the strangest in terms of combination—grains with ube.

The last dish was quite strange yet familiar—cabbage with tomato sauce flavored with tinapa (smoked fish). It recalled a similar sauce that my family used to do with boiled cabbage. We

FROM LEFT: Noma pastry chef Louise Bannon, chef Roby Goco, Micky Fenix, Aleth Ocampo, chef Yannick van Aeken, Heny Sison and Margarita Fores

never had it on my lola’s table, so it must have been something my mother had read about and decided to include in our menu ages ago.

Back to basics

Many of the dinner guests were probably expecting high-end restaurant dishes that they imagine Noma would serve. But it all boiled down to having fresh ingredients, with a minimum of processing.

After sous vide and molecular gastronomy, going back to the basics may seem such an elementary exercise. But that’s exactly what we should taste—food with ingredients that have not been cooked to death. Especially vegetables.

E-mail pinoyfood04@yahoo.com

For your retirement and other real estate needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com.

Top-selling insurance agent opens her dream café

By Ma. Esther Salcedo - Posadas
Philippine Daily Inquirer

 1 151 122

SEMBRANO developed her spicy adobo ribs recipe by experimenting with and then perfecting a dish made by her mother-in-law’s cook. Photo by Ma. Esther Salcedo-Posadas

The serving of spicy adobo ribs was tender and succulent, with just the right amount of sweetness and a hint of red chili, enough to appease the spice-averse Filipino palate. Diners have complimented the chef on her delicious food and since they opened in March 2014, Concha’s Garden Café located in Silang, Cavite has been attracting new visitors.

“Right now, I’m panicking on how to accommodate all the walk-in guests.  We’re doing well beyond my original expectations,” says Gemma Escueta Sembrano who conceptualized the business idea.

She continues, “We are getting free advertisement through word of mouth.  And it’s a good sign for a business like this.”

She convinced her three friends—Lisa De Asis, Penny Ovejera and Gina Baldo—to invest in her restaurant. It has been her lifelong desire to open a café because of her love for baking and cooking. Sembrano is also fond of gardens and that is why they built the business inside Mother Earth Gardens owned by Lita Mascarinas. It is along the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Highway, right beside the Petron gas station.

Sembrano learned her cooking skills from her grandmother whose maiden surname was Concha. She is the seventh among eight siblings and she grew up with her grandmother in Biñan, Laguna.

She remembers watching her grandmother cook and going weekly to the market with her aunt. “Before I did not enjoy going to the market because of the smell. When I got married, I started to enjoy cooking,” she says.

Sembrano tied the knot when she was only 21 years old and has two teenage girls. According to her, she was then a stay-at-home mother who dabbled in small businesses like selling barbecue in front of their house, opening a cross-stitch store, starting a water station and others.

By 2009, she joined Manulife as a sales agent and after two years, became an agency leader or unit head. Currently, she handles seven agents.  Notwithstanding her current position, Sembrano is also a member of the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) group within Manulife that includes the leading sales agents of the company.

“For me, I don’t want to rely on agent’s override. So I’m also a successful agent.” Sembrano explains that she continues to sell the products even if she is already in a supervisory role. On the other hand, her husband Joseph Raymond Sembrano serves as the branch head.

Together with the investments of her business partners, the restaurant is also the fruit of her earnings as well as the fulfillment of her dreams.  Sembrano takes a practical approach to the business and is directly involved in preparing dishes in the kitchen. Her business philosophy includes nurturing a relationship with her clients. “Later on, I will hire a manager. But the owner should still be present to maintain the personal touch,” she says.

Sembrano believes that “customers are always right” as she tries to promote a service-oriented environment in her restaurant. According to her, she has learned the importance of patience when dealing with clients because without them, there would be no sales.

Getting along with her employees is another important success factor as they often represent the ideals of the business. For first time entrepreneurs, she also gives an advice. “They should be passionate before putting up a business like this and they should be hands-on especially in the kitchen and in handling employees.”

The garden café is open from 730 a.m. to 10 p.m. and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. For more details, contact 0917-8481120.

For your retirement and other real estate needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com.