Advice On Palm Replacement

Coconut planters who are replacing ageing palms with new ones should apply appropriate fertilisers to the soil to obtain the best possible growth in the young palms.

rjIHIS is one of the recommenda- A tions on replanting made by agricultural experts attending a tech nical meeting on coconut production at Rangiroa, French Polynesia, re cently.

The experts agreed that the pro duction of many coconut plantations in the Pacific was declining to an uneconomic level due to old age and reduced fertility, and that 10 to 15 years were needed after replanting began before an overall increase in production was achieved.

They therefore recommended that owners of ageing plantations should give priority to replanting pro grammes, bearing in mind that: ® Underplanting has been shown experimentally to be feasible, but the treatment of an old stand, to ob tain the most economic renewal, will depend on local conditions. • In areas of poor soils and high light intensity (e.g. many atolls) com petition occurs between the old and the young palms for soil moisture and nutrients. • Where soils are fertile, the com

petition between the old and young palms is mainly for light.

The experts said that the compe tition in poor soils began in the second year after replanting. Therefore, thin ning of the old palms should begin in the second year with half the palms removed by three years, and the remainder when flowering begins.

On fertile soils, thinning could be gin at the end of the second year, with half of the palms being removed two years before flowering is expected to begin, and the remainder when the first palms have entered into pro duction.

Thinning should be done selec tively, removing first the least pro ductive palms distributed at random in the old stand.

“As soil nutrients will have been depleted by the old plantations even on fertile soils,” the experts said, “appropriate fertilisers are needed to obtain the best possible growth of young palms.”

They added that in some circum stances, the replacement of coconuts by alternative crops might be more profitable.