Cocoa Cultivation on Suboptimal Land

Abstract

Cocoa cultivation has been introduced at Pacitan East Java in 2009 and until today the production has not well developed as much as hope. Generally geophysics aspect does not support the growth and development of cocoa especially that caused by natural limited factors (water and soil fertility) on suboptimal land. The research propose is to evaluate the role of fertilizer on cocoa production. The soil fertility is in the low level such as C organic, total of N and organic compound as big as 0.63, 4.15, 1.08% respectively and the available of P₂O₅ is 2.72 part per million. Besides soil properties, there is another constrain which no less important to physical aspect, it is the minimum knowledge of cocoa cultivation especially maintenance aspect such as fertilizer and shoots (chupon) cutting. Fertilization has been applied three times that are after harvest, initiation of flowering and fruit formation at five samples of cocoa at every location which based on the three levels of altitude. The role of fertilizer has been evaluated from nutrition absorption (leaf tissue analysis), number of seeds per 100 g and the content of protein, fat, phenol in seed. The data has been analyzed by F test and be continued by Duncan multiple range test. N, P and K content of leaves are not significant both before (after harvest) and after fertilization (initiation of flowering and fruit formation) and it means that most of the element have distributed for formatting flower and fruit.

Keywords: Cocoa cultivation, suboptimal land, fertilizer application