Oil Palm, Cocoa and Sugarcane

How many trees per acre

Plantation crops are planted once and harvested for decades, so the spacing chosen at planting fixes the number of trees per acre for the life of the stand. The count is simple arithmetic on the spacing. Square planting at 3 by 3 meters gives each tree 9 square meters, which works out to about 1,111 trees per hectare, or roughly 450 per acre. Oil palms are usually planted in a triangle so each palm gets the same light from every side; at 9 meters between palms that’s about 143 palms per hectare, or roughly 58 per acre.

Calculated as 10,000 m² divided by the area each tree occupies; one hectare is 2.471 acres.

Closer planting gives more trees, but each tree gets less light, water and nutrients, and disease spreads faster in a crowded canopy. Cocoa grown under shade trees, which is common in agroforestry systems, has fewer cocoa trees per acre. Our guides to how many palm trees to plant per acre and oil palm yield by planting density and age go into the trade-offs.

Working out cocoa yield per acre

Cocoa yield is measured in kilograms or pounds of dry beans, and it varies more between farms than almost any other plantation crop. An old, unpruned, unfertilized smallholding with heavy disease pressure produces a small fraction of what a well-managed farm with young, improved trees can. That’s why a single “average” figure is rarely useful for planning.

A better approach is to estimate it from your own trees: count the productive trees per acre, count the healthy pods per tree over a season, and divide by the number of pods it takes to make a kilogram of dry beans. That last number, called the pod index, depends on the variety; it commonly falls somewhere between about 20 and 30 pods. The biggest levers on the result are tree age and rehabilitation, pruning, soil fertility, shade management and disease control, especially black pod and, in West Africa, cocoa swollen shoot virus. Our article on sustainable cocoa farming techniques covers the practices behind those levers.

Oil palm yield over a palm’s life

Oil palm yield is measured in tonnes of fresh fruit bunches (FFB) per hectare, and the bunches are sold to a mill that extracts the oil. What the mill gets out is the oil extraction rate, the share of bunch weight that ends up as crude palm oil, so a plantation’s oil yield per acre depends on both how many bunches it grows and how fresh and ripe they are when they reach the mill.

Yield follows the age of the palm. The first bunches come a few years after planting, output climbs to a peak in the palm’s second decade, and then falls as the palms get too tall to harvest easily, which is why estates usually replant after about 25 years. Fertilizer, especially potassium and nitrogen, and water in the dry season make the largest difference within a given age. Our piece on oil palm fertilizer and yield steps goes through them.

Sugarcane per acre

Sugarcane is measured in tons of cane per acre (or tonnes per hectare), but what the grower is paid on is usually the sugar in that cane, so recovery matters as much as tonnage. Cane yield depends on variety, water, nitrogen, the length of the growing period and which crop it is. The plant crop from new setts usually yields most, and each ratoon crop that regrows from the stubble after harvest tends to yield a little less, until the field is replanted. Timing the harvest also counts: cane left too long or crushed too late after cutting loses sugar, so growers and mills schedule fields together, and more farms now harvest green cane by machine instead of burning it first. Our guide on sugarcane farming practices and yield tips covers the basics.

Tree farming for profit

The economics of plantation and tree crops come down to patience and cash flow. Cocoa and oil palm take several years to start bearing, so the planting cost has to be carried with little or no income, which is why many smallholders intercrop food crops or plantain in the early years. Once mature, the stand produces for decades, so variety, spacing and soil preparation decisions made at planting keep paying, or costing, for a long time.

Cocoa and oil palm are also covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation, so exporters need the geolocation of each plot and proof it wasn’t cleared after 31 December 2020. On our platform, oil palm is monitored on more than 116,000 acres across 35,300+ plots in 11 countries. Satellite crop monitoring shows crop health and water need block by block, and our traceability software keeps the plot records buyers ask for.