Agriculture

On 10 February 2018 in Agro

Last year, apart from doing iOS programming (Swift) for my day job, I also got involved in agriculture. I’ve been actively doing conventional farming for almost a year now – planting mostly leafy vegetables and chillies using soil mixed with compost and chicken manure as fertilizer.

Initial attempt at planting

I also got to plant some fruit trees from seed – few types of citrus like lemon & lime, salak (snake fruit), nangka (jackfruit), guava and cempedak.

Transplanting lemon and lime trees

Since I rarely update this blog with programming stuff anymore, I thought it would be better to post about my other passion which is agriculture.

So this year, I’m planning to move further into this field, and get into commercial agriculture. I’m planning to do two side projects related to agriculture for this year – ayam kampung (free-range chicken breeding) and aquaponics (for leafy vegetables & fresh water fish)

Going to get some chicks from my in-laws

For ayam kampung, this month I’m going to start building the coop, and try to use some techniques found online to auto feed and auto water them. Specifically for feeding, I want to build a DIY feeder which use bucket and UPVC pipe as hole for the chicken to peck the feed, and for the waterer, I’m going to use PVC tank to harvest rain and connect it to poultry watering cups inside the coop.

For aquaponics, I’ll start getting the components and build the grow bed next month. This aquaponics set is meant to grow leafy vegetables like few types of sawi (mustard) like pak choy, choy sum & kai lan, spinach and lettuce. For the fish part, I plan to grow tilapia and some types of catfish (baung, keli or haruan).

I did make some money selling my vegetables, and I thought, why not monetize my passion? I did it for my passion for programming anyway.

If everything is going according to plan, I’m expecting to start selling my produce in May 2018. I’m living in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia by the way, and I’ll start selling them at my in-laws village at Kampung Segali, Sebuyau, Sarawak (between Sebangan and Batang Sadong Bridge). I’ll keep this blog updated for you readers who are interested in purchasing my organic produce. See ya!