YOGYAKARTA (JP): Some people find worms disgusting, but for Bayu Suryono, a 37-year-old resident of Kotagede, they mean money. In Bayu's hands, the worms are converted into a liquid fertilizer, which he claims is environmentally friendly.

"I have sold 30 tons of fertilizer between May, the first time I marketed the fertilizer, and last month," said Bayu.

The product is named Bio-KG, Pupuk Alami Akrab Lingkungan, which can be literally translated as Bio-KG, Environmentally Friendly Organic Fertilizer. KG stands for Kleco Group, referring to the entrepreneur's home village in Surakarta, Central Java, where he established the business in October 1999.

The product, according to Bayu, has been distributed throughout the country including: Yogyakarta; the Central Java towns of Magelang, Cilacap, Karanganyar, Boyolali, Blora, Surakarta, and Kudus; Bandung, West Java; and Samarinda in East Kalimantan.

Bayu started his fertilizer business by accident after not being able sell a harvest of worms -- an Australian species (Lumbricus Rubellus) -- which he bred.

"An instructor at a worm breeding course I joined in Bandung repeatedly told us that worms are good for fertilizing soil. That made me think that if they are good for soil, then I could make fertilizer from them," Bayu recalled.

The course also revealed that breeding worms was profitable. It even promised to buy the worms from participants, who would breed them at home, for Rp 200,000 a kilogram.

"That's why I decided to breed some. But when the harvest time came, they (the course management) could not buy mine due to a bad market and booming harvest," said Bayu.

He then milled the worms he bred using a meat mill and combined them with a mixture of water, coconut water, herbs and gadung, creeping edible tuber that is toxic if not properly cooked. To ensure that he made organic fertilizer, Bayu tested he product on plants in his own back yard.

He tried it with two different pare plants, a green, bitter and warty squash-like vegetable which grows on vines. He used his worm fertilizer for one plant and a chemical product for the second one. Two months later Bayu discovered that the first plant grew much better than the other. It even yielded 20 young fruit, while the other only produced five.

Bayu's experiment made him feel confident that the fertilizer would work well on various plants.

In April this year Bayu, a father of two, started producing the fertilizer commercially and marketed it a month later. He said that the product must be fermented for a month before it is ready for use.

Process

In order to create 100 liters of liquid fertilizer from worms, Bayu requires 10 kilograms of fresh worms which he buys at Rp 20,000 per kilogram from farmers in a number of towns in the provinces of Yogyakarta, Central Java and West Java. A kilogram of worms usually consists of between 2,000 and 2,400 three-month-old worms.

All of the fresh worms are milled with the herbs and tuber, before being mixed with the water and coconut water. After being filtered through a piece of cloth, the fluid is kept in plastic drums for 30 days allowing fermentation to occur. During the fermentation process, the fluid must be stirred for an hour a day and kept away from direct sunlight.

"After 30 days, it will be ready for packing," said Bayu.

Bayu offers two types of packaging for the fertilizer: in plastic drums containing 200 liters of the product, or in plastic bottles holding one liter.

Each month he produces about six tons of fertilizer, and his stocks are always sold out.

"I could not meet all of the orders due to the limited capability of the milling machine and employees I have," said Bayu. Currently, he only operates two meat mills and employs four people.

With an initial capital investment of Rp 10 million and additional working capital of Rp 20 million recently borrowed from a bank, Bayu plans to produce between 10 and 20 tons of fertilizer from January.

The fertilizer is sold to distributors for Rp 8,000 per liter, who then sell it to consumers for between Rp 15,000 and Rp 20,000 per liter.

"We once sold it at a cheap price but people thought that it might be a fake product and refused to buy it. Then the distributors agreed to sell it for Rp 20,000 a liter and it quickly sold out," said Bayu.

In order to assure smooth distribution, Bayu also requires his worm providers to use and sell his fertilizer. For every five kilograms of worms they sell to Bayu, they have to buy 100 liters of fertilizer in exchange. Accordingly, if they want to buy 100 liters of fertilizer from Bayu, they have to sell him five kilograms of worms. "This way I can protect the supply of the raw materials as well," Bayu said.