Melendres Agricultural Farm is located in Antipolo City, Rizal, Philippines.
At the moment they have about 50 square meters of vermicomposting beds with African nightcrawlers under 100 square meters of roof space, and produce 140 sacks (80 liters each), of prime vermicast every 45 days (that’s 11,200 liters in total)…
Currently, harvesting is done with a manual screen. However they are building a small trommel, and adding a sack filling station with loading conveyor, automatic scale and sack closing sewing machine.
The sacks in this photo are for immediate local consumption and are not lined. For retail sales, they add a polyethylene micro-perforated liner to control moisture and still allow the bacteria to breath…
The roof rafters and purlins were milled from a mango tree that destroyed the vermi house during a typhoon in 2014. The vermi house was the first structure reconstructed on the farm following the typhoon.
They are also in the process of adding another 150 square meters of covered beds, using dry stacked concrete blocks, not mortared as the ones shown. The floors of the beds are native soil to allow drainage.
Bedding consists of chopped banana plant trunks topped with aerobically composted coffee grounds (originally from Starbucks), mixed with on-farm sourced organic hog and quail manures, fresh weeds, various tropical leguminous tree leaves, spent mushroom substrate and chopped fresh vegetables. The worms are fed with chopped vegetables and mature organic hog manure…
Here is a photo of the farm, on which they grow lettuces, culinary herbs, mushrooms and organic hogs…
Mike Melendres and James Tomell in front of one of the sprouting houses. They use a mixture of vermicast, fine biochar and leaf mold in their sprouting mix and using quality seeds, their germination rate is 99+ percent…
