One model farm that attendees of the recent National Vegetable Congress held in General Santos City visited is the organic farm of Capt. James Fos Reamon, a commercial pilot, in Brgy. Katungauan of the same city. There they saw beautifully growing high-value vegetables like carrots, hybrid tomatoes, ampalaya, eggplant, lettuce, pechay, cauliflower, rootcrops and many more.
Aside from vegetables, the 2.4-hectare diversified farm boasts of fruit trees like exotic mango varieties, avocado, pummelo, latexless jackfruit, aromatic coconut, lemon and others. The farm also has a small parcel for growing organic rice, a fishpond for growing fish and ornamental water plants like Nymphaea.
The farm is being developed into a showcase of organic farming practices like the production of vermicast, a very potent organic fertilizer, using the African nightcrawler earthworm. James is considered the biggest vermicast producer in southern Mindanao today, producing half a ton of pure vermicast everyday. He envisions his farm to eventually become a tour destination for people interested in organic farming.
Capt. Reamon’s interest in farming started quite late. In 2002, when he was already 46 years old, the brothers and sisters were given their share of the farmland inherited from their parents. And that’s when he started figuring out what he would do with his share of the property. One of the first things that came to his mind was to raise eel since there were plenty of elvers that could be had from the mouth of the river in General Santos City.
He had thought of raising earthworms to be used as feed for the elvers. He came to us asking for possible sources of earthworms that he could raise in his farm. What we told him, however, changed his mind. We told him it might be more practical for him to raise the earthworms not for feeding to elvers. He could raise earthworms for sale as breeders and for the production of vermicast. At that time, the price of earthworms as breeders was P600 to P1000 per kilo. Vermicast, on the other hand, was being sold at P25 to P30 per kilo.
To produce marketable eel, we told him, would take him one-and-a-half years to culture. And the price per kilo is much less than that of the African nightcrawler which can be produced in a matter of three to four months. And that was the start of his passion for culturing earthworms for organic farming.
Before starting his own vermiculture project, he had to visit several vermiculture practitioners like those in San Pablo City and Calauan, Laguna, and Pam Henares in Bacolod City. He found that there were different ways of culturing earthworms. He chose to adopt, however, the system of Palm Henares which uses production bins in open spaces under the trees.
Today he has hundreds of production bins measuring one meter wide and four meters long, bordered by hollow blocks. The earthworms feed on a mixture of animal manure (cows, goats) and crop residues like leaves, stalks and vines. From one bin, he could harvest 200 kilos of vermicast in three months.
It did not take long for him to become popular with his vermicast. The soil on the farm he inherited had become practically unproductive because of too much use of chemical fertilizers and pesticide. It was previously rented out for banana production to a multinational company. With the vermicast that James has produced, soil on the farm has been rehabilitated. It is no longer acidic and is now conducive to healthy plant growth.
The rootcrops like gabi have been producing big roots. The carrots are also producing high yields, thanks to the vermicast applied on the soil as well as the vermi tea sprayed weekly on the plants. By the way, Capt. Reamon is the inventor of the vermi tea brewer which garnered first prize in the Creative Research category during the 2005 Inventors Week under the auspices of the Department of Science and Technology.
The vermi tea brewer, he said, has become a best seller. A company that manufactures shredding machines has made it as part of a package that it supplies to a religious organization doing community development. The vermi tea brewer converts the vermicast into a cheap but effective foliar fertilizer not only for vegetables but also for major crops like, rice, sugarcane, corn, fruit trees and many others.
One rice farmer who used nothing but vermi tea in his 30-hectare rice farm in Nueva Ecija is Ed Reyes. By using nothing but vermi tea, he spent only P2,000 on fertilizers per hectare, according to Capt. Reamon. Reyes got an average of 100 cavans per hectare. The P2,000 worth of vermi tea he used was just the equivalent of about 1.5 bags of chemical fertilizer. Many small as well as big current users of his vermicast and vermi tea are growers of banana, pummelo, pineapple and other crops.
In his own farm Capt. Reamon sprays vermi tea weekly on his vegetables and rice, and every two weeks on his fruit trees. He has a number of selected fruit trees on his farm. One of them is an avocado that produces fruits in big clusters. This variety (unnamed) is outstanding not only for its prolificacy but also for its excellent taste. The flesh has a mealy consistency that most people are looking for in an avocado fruit. One more thing, according to Capt. Reamon, this variety has the habit of producing fruits after most other varieties have finished fruiting. Thus, a fellow who plants this variety could get a good price in the market since the supply would have dwindled by the time of his harvest.
Capt. Reamon also takes pride in the Golden Queen mango which he obtained from Teresa Orchard & Nursery about six years ago. It is producing a lot of fruits today, each weighing 800 grams to way above one kilo. He is also very proud of his aromatic coconut whose fruits are smaller than the standard coconut but whose coconut water is very sweet. Not yet fruiting is his Pisang Seribu banana which produces 1.5 meters of fruit bunch. Providing him with construction materials in his farm are his giant bamboos and the Black Bamboo. He recently built a greenhouse using giant bamboo as post.
One landmark that visitors will not fail to notice in Capt. Reamon’s farm is his huge windmill that does not look like the traditional windmill at all. It does not have blades that rotate like a propeller. Instead, it uses the principle of aerodynamics which Capt. Reamon probably learned in college as an aeronautic engineer. The blades are installed vertically, and cannot be damaged by strong typhoons. The windmill was adjudged the 1984 Invention of the Year and was awarded a Presidential Gold Medal as well as the World Intellectual Property Gold Medal. The same invention won the gold medal in an international competition in Bulgaria in 1985. Subsequently, the right to manufacture in Australia was bought by an Australian company.
Capt. Reamon enjoys farming immensely. He looks to the day when he will retire from flying and devote his full time to organic farming and other related activities. In the meantime, however, he relies on his beloved Gay Reamon, his spouse of many years, as his partner in managing the farm. Now and then, they also involve their children in the planning of future developments in their various projects.
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