Cocoa in Oil Palm

Planted Cocoa as inter crop in our 10 years old Oil Palm plantation. We should have done this four years back. Around 5^th year is the ideal time for planting cocoa in Oil Palm.

Procured cocoa saplings from the nursery maintained by Mondelez formerly known as Cadbury at Ganganagudem village (Close to Eluru), West Godavari @4.5 Rupees a plant.

Cocoa saplings

Our Oil Palm is spaced at 9X9 meters and planted cocoa in center between two rows of Oil Palm at 3X3 meters. With this spacing we planted around 140 cocoa plants per acre. While planting vermin compost enriched with VAM (Arbuscular Mycorrhizal) is applied in the pits.

Plantation Layout

In ideal conditions cocoa should start yielding from second year and should attain maximum yield by 5^th or 6^th year.  Cocoa Yield in Oil palm is not par with cocoa in Coconut. Average yield of cocoa in Oil Palm in our area is around 150 – 300 Kilograms per acre while it is 300-500 Kilograms in coconut.

Soon we will start giving Jeevarutham along with water and as spray as well.

That’s all for now, will keep you updated.

Update - July 2016

We did the training and pruning of the cocoa sapling in last 2-3 months and this is how they look after 1 year of planting. We noticed flowering on one of our plants.

This is the shape we intent to give to our plants as they grow.