In agribusiness, you don’t have to be an instant success. Usually, there are costly mistakes in the beginning. And that’s the reason why experts usually advise people to start small. That way, when one fails, the loss is bearable.

That’s also the case of Brookside Farm in Anupol, Bamban, Tarlac, a piggery with a commercial layer operation that was added much later.

Chito Ho, the farm’s chief operations executive, said that in 1986, the family which was then in the cosmetics business decided to invest in a piggery. He said they were inspired by a friend from Greenhills who was making good in the swine business.

They bought a 13-hectare former sugarcane plantation in Bamban for just half a million pesos. They started with just 65 sows which is considered a small operation. For five years, they maintained that population level where Chito said they committed a lot of mistakes. These included the wrong design of the building, poor drainage system, the feeding troughs were too high for the pigs, wrong feed formulation and so on. But they learned a lot from their mistakes. After that, they already learned the right things to do.

Today, the original farm has become a huge operation and some of the best practices have been adopted. The piggery in Anupol has now grown into a 1,500-sow level operation. Another piggery with a current 2,000-sow level population has been put up in Sto. Rosario, Capas, Tarlac. And in Anupol, a huge poultry operation with a population of 100,000 layers was started.

Between the two pig farms, they produce some 4,500 fattened hogs a month under normal conditions. The profit margin is better than most other farms because they have adopted cost-cutting strategies. One of them is the building of huge biogas systems both in Capas and in Bamban. The biogas systems produce methane gas that is converted into electricity for use in their various farm operations. The piggery in Capas used to spend P600,000 for electricity a month supplied by the local electric cooperative. Because of biogas, the farm now saves P400,000 a month on electricity. A similarly big saving has also been effected at the Anupol farm.

Aside from lighting requirements, the electricity from biogas is also used for running the feedmill operations as well as for continuous cooking in the farm. More recently, the company decided to manufacture its own wire poultry cages and also to fabricate for outsiders. The farm in effect can produce wire cages that are 20 to 25 percent cheaper than other suppliers because of almost-free electricity..

Chito said that they will also soon manufacture egg trays and he is sure that they will have a much cheaper production cost, thanks to the electricity from biogas.

The first biogas system (at the Capas farm) was constructed by a multinational company for P11 million. Chito assembled his own engineering crew and they constructed the Anupol biogas system for less than half the price of the Capas biogas system. The biogas system in Anupol occupies about half a hectare and can generate 200 cubic meters of methane gas in one day.

Chito says that they can build biogas systems for piggeries with as low as 50 sow-level. He is sure that such systems can lower the farm owners’ production cost.