As part of the World Cocoa Foundation’s field trip to Bahia, partners and delegates were invited to visit the cocoa nursery and see for themselves the work being carried out at The Biofábrica de Cocoa Institute (IBC), situated 35km north-west of Ilhéus.
The cocoa nursery produces vast quantities of cocoa, cultivars, including manioc, essences and other fruit trees – claiming to be the largest cocoa nursery in Brazil, if not the world.
In a statement on its website, Biofábrica claims to be the first institute in the world dedicated to the continuous production, on an industrial scale, of selected, disease resistant and high productivity cacao genotypes (clones).
It is also noted as one of the most modern micropropagation laboratories in Brazil. The institute was founded in 1997 and its mission is to produce, multiply and distribute ‘genetic material of seedlings of high agronomic value’ to the country’s farmers.
Another innovation of the Biofábrica is the production of seedlings rocamboles. A rocambole is capable of containing 50 seedlings, of the same or different species, which reduces space for cultivation and also in transportation. With these new options, more than 400,000 seedlings were distributed in the first half of 2016 alone.
In the video, the facility's agronomist Lanns Almeida talks about the nursery’s objective to produce selected, disease resistant and cacao seedlings of high productivity, in addition to seedlings of other forest species.
