Thai teacher 'gets rich' from raising palm weevils

The story of a retired Thai female teacher in Co Muong village, Chau Kim commune, Que Phong district, raising palm weevils in large quantities and selling them to the market has surprised many people. “Seeing is believing”, we went to find out on a day in mid-September.

The house we visited is located right next to Highway 16, through Co Muong village, Chau Kim commune. The palm weevil breeder is Ms. Lo Thi Cuong (born in 1960). Taking us on a tour of the palm weevil breeding area, we saw a series of green and red plastic pots, more than 50cm in diameter, all covered with wooden panels, neatly arranged on shelves. Ms. Luong said that in each plastic pot is a nest of palm weevil, each nest is recorded with the date of breeding to harvest on schedule.

Lifting the lid of a plastic basin that is about to be harvested, Ms. Luong picks up a piece of coconut shell and flips it over, revealing white palm weevils, as big as a finger joint, wriggling in a pile of rotting food. Ms. Luong says that palm weevils’ food consists of coconut shells, short, split sugarcane, fresh cassava, green or ripe bananas, corn flour, and rice bran. Of these, coconut shells make up the majority. All are mixed together.

Accordingly, each nest is released with 20 pairs of breeding ants (king ants), in just 1 week they will lay eggs, hatch into larvae and harvest in just 24 days. When the pupae are fat, the skin turns yellow-white, plump, then they reach their best taste.

“I ask for coconut shells from water shops, people just throw them away and don’t do anything with them. If I have to buy them, they are cheap. Cassava, bananas, sugarcane, corn bran, rice bran are all available in the countryside… The process of caring for palm weevils is not too complicated, just feed them at the beginning when the king ants have finished laying eggs. After that, just leave them alone, the palm weevils will eat the nutrients from the coconut shells, cassava and palm cores,” Ms. Luong shared.

Talking about palm weevil farming, Ms. Lo Thi Luong confided: By chance, one day last May, she heard that someone in the commune was successfully farming palm weevil, and many people bought them to eat, so she immediately went to see.

Curious, she found that palm weevils were easy to raise and cost little, while people only raised a few pots, so the quantity was insignificant. Back home, she researched more on documents and decided to invest time in raising palm weevils for sale.

To have offspring, she first went into the palm forest in the village and caught 40 palm weevils to raise, then developed them into king ants (offspring). She used as many king ants as she could to make parent offspring. From the initial 40 offspring, after 1 month she multiplied hundreds of pairs of parent offspring.

By the end of July, she started raising palm weevils commercially, from 5 initial experimental pots, to date she has multiplied to nearly 80 pots. By using the pillow-day breeding method, every day she can harvest 4-5 pots, weighing 2-3 kg of commercial weevils, selling for 200,000 VND/kg.

Ms. Luong said that customers who buy palm worms are mainly local people who buy them as gifts or process them into food. People often process them by stir-frying palm worms with pickled bamboo shoots, or stir-frying them with lemon leaves and chili, which is very attractive. Palm worms are raised with clean foods, are characterized by being fragrant and fatty, and high in protein, so after processing they are favored by many people.

“After each batch of palm weevil farming, the food source in the pot runs out of nutrients and becomes dregs, no longer able to feed the weevil, so a new batch must be replaced. The dregs can be used as fertilizer for plants, especially for growing bananas and cassava. After that, bananas and cassava roots can be used as food, creating a cycle for raising palm weevil,” said Ms. Luong.

Mr. Mac Van Tuat - Chairman of the Farmers' Association of Que Phong district said that Ms. Lo Thi Cuong's successful experiment in raising palm worms is a new model, the first in the district. Currently, some farmers in the area have come to buy and create breeding larvae for trial breeding. Palm worms are not a popular food, and it is even difficult to find them. Therefore, the current high price of palm worms is inevitable./.