MANILA, Philippines — Most business graduates dream of joining a corporate operation after graduation.

There are some, however, who opt to go into farming as their full-time endeavor. Just like Lucio Alfredo Cubillejo, a master’s degree holder in business management.

One of his most promising projects today is a papaya plantation where some 3,500 Red Royale papayas are heavily laden with fruits that are expected to start ripening this December.

The good thing about Lowell, that’s his nickname, is that when he sees an opportunity, he practically grabs it immediately. Last April, he read our story in this section on the Red Royale papaya plantation in Cavite. Posthaste, he visited the plantation and was immediately impressed with what he saw - dwarf very fruitful papayas.

Right away he ordered P18,000 worth of Red Royale seeds from East-West Seed Company, the breeder of the new variety, and germinated them himself. He was able to germinate 3,700 which he planted one month later. Only 3,500 remain today, however, because the 200 were damaged by the two recent typhoons Pedring and Quiel.

Weather permitting, Lowell hopes to make a decent profit from his papaya trees. As per his record of expenses, the cost per tree up to this day is about P55. That’s equivalent to 4 to 5 marketable ripe fruits at the current farm gate price of P12 per kilo.

He said that each tree is expected to produce 10 to 15 marketable fruits in one year. Let us take an average of 12 marketable fruits per tree. The total marketable fruits from his 3,500 trees would be 42,000.

If each fruit weighs 1.5 kilos, that will amount to 63 tons or 63,000 kilos. At P12 per kilo, that would give a gross of P756,000. Take away P256,000 as expenses for production, harvesting and marketing and you have a cool profit of P500,000 in one cropping. The profit could be much more if the trees continue to be productive after harvesting all the present fruits on the trees.

One of Lowell’s early projects was hog fattening which he started after graduation from his undergraduate course in 2004. He is into this project up to this day but he says, it is becoming unprofitable.

In the early years, he said, it was really profitable because the farm gate price was P110 to P115 per kilo liveweight and the price of feeds was only P750 per bag of 50 kilos. Today, the farm gate price has gone down to P85 per kilo whereas the feeds have gone up to P1,200 to P1,300 per bag of 50 kilos. As the experts will tell you, the cost of feeds is about 70 percent of the cost of production. Lowell, however, is not about to give up hog fattening yet. He is still hoping for better times. He knows there are cycles in agribusiness.

Actually, Lowell applied for a job in a well known bank in Manila after finishing his bachelor’s degree. He was hired all right but he resigned immediately because he was being assigned in Tondo where he was to accompany the armored van. He thought he might as well engage in agribusiness like his father. And he is glad that he did.

For the latest in farming and gardening, log on to: www.zacsarian.blogspot.com. We are really inspired because we now know there are people who like our blog. In the past several days, more than 500 people were already visiting our blog daily. And we are just a few weeks old since we revived the site that we started and maintained for just a few days in 2009.