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Farmers...
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they have to treat the soil,
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right from the beginning.
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And… just like when you’re growing a fish.
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One of the things you have to take care is the water,
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but most people don’t care of the soil, when they’re growing plants.
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They can see inside the water,
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but they cannot see on the soil, what’s underneath the soil.
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Cocoa grows naturally.
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Some cuts, some shells, are left on the field,
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so that flies which help pollinate,
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will help us to pollinate at the time of flowering.
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Because if we put every thing into the compost bin,
then here we will suffer, there will be no production.
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There are basically two types of reproduction,
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which are very easy to use to produce cacao plants. One is by using the seed,
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that is the sexual reproduction method.
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It’s the easiest, but its disadvantage is that
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the little trees that grow from seeds,
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are sometimes very different from one to the other. In other words, they have much variability.
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And the other propagation system...
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is the asexual or vegetative propagation method.
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In which you use part
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of a plant, usually, the branches or the aerial parts of the plant.
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Which will really produce identical characteristics of the parent plant.
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Therefore this is the foremost method used in the cultivation of cacao.
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Now we take the twig.
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This will stay between 4 and 5 months,
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in the nursery, to obtain this result.
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The banana trees first give shade to the young plant.a.
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And after a few years, lets say 5 or 10 years,
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When the banana trees start to suffocate the young plants, we remove them.
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Then, it’s around the big trees we have planted,
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that the cacao plants will get their shade.
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The growing of cocoa is a polyculture.
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Always having cacao as flagship product.
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But next to it we have timber wood.
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We also plant inside the field fruit trees, like jackfruit trees, mango trees.
And then pineapples also.
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Like this we feed the family,
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and we can sell the rest. You can sell it as well, you can sell all this here. Yes…
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Pruning is made annually.
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We prune the trees annually.
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I pruned last year and this year I´m thinking of doing a minor maintenance.
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This will not be a severe, rigorous pruning.
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Just a minor maintenance.
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Pruning on this plantation is made according to the months of the year.
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We enter into a strong summer,
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and when the strong summer is leaving, when we start to enter a bit into winter, we need to start pruning.
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Because we have already experienced, that when we prune during the summer season, the plant suffers.
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It’s not an easy job,
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We can grow, we can improve the yield.
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But to be able to sustain
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for the long run, it’s not easy.
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Because as we know,
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the productive life cycle of cocoa plant, is about 25 years to 30 years.
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But then,
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if we chop it down, and replace with a new plant...
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For cocoa it’s possible. So instead of chopping the trees down,
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you can actually do engineering on it.
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One of the ways what we do engineering is by side grafting. Grafting the tree.
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So you’re actually introducing a younger branch into the tree.
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So you are motivating the tree to become young again.
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The main idea is to improve the youngest,
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and the bonus is the genetic side of it.
