Good to see the hard work of our nursery managers. SEveral months ago, we hired a professional nursery manager, with a background in agronomy and with several years of experience in nursery development/seedling raising at commercial scale. Last month when I visited (january 2023), it was still empty land, with only the bamboo poles already waiting for being used. Our team was waiting for the delivery from Jakarta, paranets and steel poles. Yes, they also order online from Jakarta to get the cheapest and best quality products).
ONce all arrived, within a few weeks the extension of the nursery is looking really professional, strong and almost ready to start raising seedlings. The new nursery manager also directly improved the older part of the nursery, making it stronger.
We aim to raise 400,000 new seedlings per cycle. We hope to have 2 cycles per year, making almost 1 million seedlings per year. This will allow us to control our seedling production and availability while ensuring the quality and quantity. It will benefit the new farmers, as we can plan better with them when to start and distribute the seedlings to them, while also providing better quality. We have had some relatively high death rates of trees which came during the corona times. Not being able to travel, we had to find alternative solutions to get the required seedlings (see the post of 11 march 2021). The mahogany seedlings we received form Forestry turned out to be bad quality, as they were also affected by the corona times, not being able to go around and look for good quality seeds and seedlings. With the new nursery we will be self supporting and also able to replace the trees that did not survive through corona, while also having to struggle through 2 years of unpredictable and irregular rainfall. Replanting will be done starting from September onwards, We will plant more areas so that potential carbon losses from trees that died will be reversed to make it even above the required targets.