Coconut sector on the move

A 300-acre coconut farm is being established in St Thomas by an unnamed large investor, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Floyd Green has disclosed.

Meanwhile, the largest coconut farm in Jamaica, also in the parish of St Thomas, is soon to mechanise the husking of its dry coconuts, moving away from the traditional practice of husking the fruits manually.

These are some of the developments in the coconut sector which now has an estimated 5,000 trees, nationally, up from about 1,000 trees after the sector was devastated by the lethal yellowing disease and Hurricane Gilbert in the 1980s.

Lethal yellowing is a devastating disease that affects palms, including coconuts. It is caused by phytoplasma, that is, specialised bacteria that are transmitted between plants by insect vectors.

Minister Green said the land for the new farm was recently acquired from the Sugar Corporation of Jamaica. However, he declined to identify the investor involved in the project.

“We have a long way to go but we have been seeing the investments in the coconut sector by both small and big investors,” Green told the Financial Gleaner.

Green also praised the work of the Coconut Industry Board, which he said had been integral to slowing the spread of the lethal yellowing disease by about 70 per cent.

As is the case in other sectors, the coconut industry is affected by the labour shortage, and in particular the scarcity of huskers who manually remove the husk surrounding the dry coconuts.

Noah Black, operations manager at the 750-acre Michael Black Farm in the eastern parish, says they will soon be mechanising the process of husking, using technology from India.

He did not give a timeline for this move, but said it was the way to go as the industry was moving away from manual husking.

“Nobody believes in hard work like first time. It is harder for these young people to work in the sun,” Black said, adding that the experienced huskers were getting older and not being replaced.

The third-generation farmer said 10,000 to 15,000 dry coconuts are reaped and husked on the farm from Monday to Friday, and that a good worker can husk between 1,500 and 2,000 nuts per day.

“While in India I found a machine that can do 2,000 coconuts per hour. That means mechanising is the way to go. In India the farms are fully mechanised, no workforce is needed, and that’s the way everyone is going,” Black said.

Black suggested for the future a number of smaller coconut farmers in an area could pool their resources to acquire a machine to share their husking duties.

Commenting on the recovery of the coconut industry, General Manager of the Coconut Industry Board, Shaun Cameron, said 9,000 trees were lost due to lethal yellowing and Gilbert, leaving approximately 1,000, but said the numbers were back up to 5,000 because of the distribution of free seedlings, fertiliser and training by the Coconut Board.

“There is a push to get new persons to transition to farming. We’re not just looking at the traditional farmers – we are looking at the young persons with access to family land, and professionals who have retired who are looking at coconuts as a business proposition rather than a means of survival,” Cameron said.

Last year, there were 16,954 hectares of land under coconuts at the end of 2023, with 16,625 hectares listed as bearing coconuts, according to the Coconut Industry Board’s report for 2023.

Meanwhile, the total population of coconut trees was calculated as 3,848,041, which is up from 3,741,885 in 2022. Of this number, 3.77 million were seven years old and over, and should have been in full-bearing, but faulty agronomic practices affected the yield. Some trees did not bear nuts, the board said.

For this fiscal year, the Coconut Industry Board is looking to expand agro-processing output and value-added exports of coconut by at least five per cent, according the operational plans published within the March 2025 version of the Jamaica Public Bodies report produced by the Ministry of Finance.

luke.douglas@gleanerjm.com