Seedlings

We are supporting a network of nurseries that grow and offer better quality, more resilient seedlings and young cocoa trees to farmers. We have supplied over six million seedlings to farmers in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Indonesia since 2013 and our aim is to supply a further one million seedlings in the next year.

Why seedlings are important

Many of the cocoa farmers we work with in origin countries rely on ageing, unproductive cocoa trees, often without suitable inputs, finance and skills to invest in planting new trees to regenerate their farms. It takes around five years from planting for a tree to mature, so a long-term view is needed. Replanting must be carefully planned, since replacing old but still marginally productive trees reduces cocoa production and income until the new trees start producing cocoa.

Our approach

We are providing scalable access to planting materials and education to farmers about how best to grow new seedlings and young trees across our origin countries. Thanks to our economies of scale and partnerships with cooperatives, we can offer high-quality cocoa seedlings to farmers at affordable and attractive prices.

In Côte d’Ivoire, we have worked with Centre National de Recherche Agronomique de Côte d’Ivoire (CNRA), Conseil Café Cacao, and ANADER, to establish a nursery program through which we grow better quality seedlings and sell them to farmers at cost price. We are now using innovative technology to grow more resilient seedlings at 12 nurseries across the country. Together, these nurseries now supply almost 100,000 seedlings a year and plan to supply 2 million in 2017/2018. We are on track, having already grown 1.25 million plants.

In Ghana, we are establishing four nursery sites. So far, we have produced 720,000 cocoa seedlings and we plan to grow and sell 990,000 seedlings in 2017/2018. As we are setting up rural Service Centers through our partnerships with, amongst others, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Solidaridad, we stopped producing cocoa seedlings for free as our aim is to make the project self-sufficient.

In Indonesia, we have supported farmers in establishing 63 nurseries, which have produced 229,700 seedlings to date. 82,800 of these were grown in 2017. Some of these nurseries have been developed into successful business ventures. After growing 3,000 seedlings, which we sponsored them to produce, some farmers have gone on to secure contracts with the Indonesian government.

We are also part of the Projeto Cacau Mais Sustentável (More Sustainable Cocoa Project) in Brazil which aims to foster cocoa farming among smallholders while restoring degraded areas. The project has supported the Hybrid Seed Production Center in Tacumã to double its production capacity to one million cocoa seeds every year. 150 smallholders are now farming 10,000 hectares of carefully prepared plantation land.

In Cameroon, we are working to build up the capacity of the cooperatives, to ensure they are trained on the establishment and maintenance of the nurseries as part of our sequential approach, before we begin our nursery program there.

Progress and highlights

203 nurseries set up and over 6,740,064 seedlings grown globally since 2013

12 nurseries up and running in Côte d’Ivoire, which supplied 387,507 new seedlings in 2016

63 nurseries in Indonesia with a capacity of 229,700 seedlings

Looking ahead

Our hope is that the project model we are testing in Côte d’Ivoire will be suitable for nurseries producing at a large scale. Our intention is that any nurseries we create will eventually become self-sufficient businesses in their own right. We are also piloting a scheme through which nurseries will sell young cocoa trees to farmers.

In Cameroon, we are working to build up the capacity of the cooperatives, to ensure they are trained on the establishment and maintenance of the nurseries as part of our sequential approach, before we begin our nursery program there.