When most Belizeans think about a soursop flashes of irresistible ideals, super sweet ice cream, and a refreshingly quenching drink on a hot day come to mind. But those of you who look for the precious fruit at the market, know that finding a soursop is difficult and even when you do find it, the price is always high.
Well, the truth about soursop is that market vendors just can't get enough of it to keep lovers of the fruit satisfied. And why is soursop in such short supply? Well, the fruit is under attack by numerous plagues that do not allow it to bear. That's going to be changing shortly however with initiatives of the Agriculture Department which wants to create a surplus of soursop. Alfonso Noble_found out how.
Alfonso Noble Reporting,
It's almost taken for granted that whenever sour sop trees come into yield this is what that trees offer: dried up underdeveloped fruits. But recently the Ministry of Agriculture has called for the prioritization of the production of the fruit because of its vast market potential. This is being done with Costa Rican technology to increase yields exponentially.
Gary Ramirez, Ministry of Agriculture
"Most farmers could tell you, most people who have trees in their yard could tell you there is not even one sour sop that you could get off your tree."
"Everywhere in the country you have very poor yields from sour sop trees mainly because of the infestation of the pest or the disease and it causes the fruit to drop."
"We have identified three diseases and three pests that affect sour sop in our immediate area. Initially what we did was invite BAHA to establish an insect trap in the field and from the trap we have identified the main pest that was in the area. The biggest problem we have in terms of pest is the lace bug, which is an insect that affects the leaf of the plant, and then there is also a moth. The problem with the moth is that its nocturnal and attacks the fruit mainly at night and the problem is with the high infestation of it in an area and so it infects the entire crop on a tree."
Gary Ramirez, the Ministry of Agriculture's extension officer in the Belize District says that this pitfall is now being avoided by covering the fruits with specially designed plastic bags and implementing a rigorous field management program.
Gary Ramirez,
"The bags are treated with an insecticide and basically it repels insect from attacking the fruit and protects the bags for duration of the growth of the fruit itself."
"Initially when the bags they came from Costa Rica and they were brought in by IICA we came to the field and we applied the bags and we realized that was not working. There was still an infestation of insects and diseases in the area so we went back and spoke to the farmer and he provided us with some assistance and we started out with the pruning of the trees. With the pruning of the trees we look for 5 things mainly: remove all branches that are one meter and below on the tree, remove all branches that were inside the tree on the main trunk to provide more light to enter, remove all dead branches from the tree, the top of the tree - the highest growing point that allows the tree to grow tall we remove that so that the tree could spread, and we have a branch on the tree that most agriculture technicians would call 'suckers' which are branches that produce at all but simply grow and we also remove those."
"So we have found out that if you conduct the full field management you get better fruits, you get wholesome fruit, and in fact you get fruit period. To date the yields that we are getting are an average of 20 to 25 fruits per tree with a minimum of about 15 and a high of about 35. Those fruit yield about 4 to 4 ½ pounds and if you have about say 60 to 70 trees in your field then you get an average of about 5,000 to 8,000 pounds per acre."
More fruits that are welcomed into an accommodating market where there is great demand for the soursop fruit.
Gary Ramirez,
"Without even looking at the export market, we know that Belizeans consume sour sop and they like it and they are a lot of medicinal uses for sour sop so the initial market study we did with the farmer he received somewhere about $2 to $2.25 per pound for sour sop."
That will hopefully have farmers adopting this new technology to improve yields and diversify fruit production, deepening the country's proverbial agricultural breadbasket.
The farm we visited, that of John Gongora in Sandhill, is working a test plot for soursop. Information gathered will be passed on to the Agriculture Department and from there to farmers interested in soursop production.