REHABILITATING, REGENERATING AND REPLANTING A COCOA FARM

By Dennis Owusu Boateng
Cocoa Technical Officer
BUNSO COCOA COLLEG, GHANA COCOA BOARD

Importance:

Many cocoa farms in West and Central African are old (more than 40 years) and have low yields due to the age of the trees, as well as other factors such as poor maintenance and pest and diseases
A healthy cocoa tree produces 25 pods per year that results in approximately 1kg of dry cocoa. As a guideline, yield per year can be divided into:
Good (20 or more pods per tree)
Average (15-18 pods per tree)
Poor (10 or less pods per tree)
This means that trees producing 10 or less pods a year are unproductive and you should think about what you need to do to improve their productivitY

There are three approaches to improving cocoa production:

Rehabilitation: This is defined as any method or activity that can bring existing trees into better production. Rehabilitation of cocoa trees involves pruning of cocoa (see “Pruning older cocoa trees”) and shade trees, removing all diseased and pest-infected pods, dead and diseased branches, mistletoe, chupons, controlling weeds and disease and pest control. Rehabilitation may also involve cleaning out clogged drainage ditches and adding fertilizer or organic matter to renew soil nutrients. Many of the discovery learning exercises in this manual focus on rehabilitation techniques.

Regeneration: Regeneration means grafting new genetic material onto the old root system.

Replanting: Cocoa trees are like humans: they wear out and need to be replaced.

Source: Bunso Cocoa College