Rubber Grows IN Trees

Dripping into a coconut shell,
propped up by a twig.

I learned a little bit more about rubber growing, a major cash crop in this area, in the last week.

 

 The people here are slash & burn farmers, and rice and rubber are two of their main crops. They mostly do dry rice cultivation, as opposed to the wet rice paddies I'm now used to seeing.

 

When they want to plant rubber, they plant the rubber tree seedling when in a rice field when the rice is a certain height. Then the seedlings can start growing with the rice, and will still be short enough at rice harvest time so as to not interfere with the harvest. Once the rice is harvested, the trees keep on growing. I am told that if the farmers take care of the trees and keep undergrowth from growing up around them, the trees can be ready to harvest in about 20 years.

 

Extracting the rubber from the trees is a little different from tapping maple or birch sap. Rather than pound in a spile and collect the daily drippings that way, the farmers carve a diagonal cut halfway around the tree. This entire line oozes latex-sap, which flows along the cut to a spout (possibly) at the end, then trickles or drips down into a small container. These containers may be made of an old water bottle, a length of bamboo, half a coconut shell, or whatever is handy.



Rubber drying into a sheet.
 

The sap only runs for a few hours after each cut, so the farmer goes out and shaves off the last cut-line a little more each day--just enough to get a new flow of sap.

 

The blackened area is what has been cut over time.

They usually also gather the rubber every day. I'm not too clear on the whole rubber preparation process, but it involves soaking the rubber in water, adding something into it, somehow making it runny again, and pouring it into a frame to let it dry into a sheet. It gets run through a ringer-type device afterward, and is bundled up to be sold. Some people don't want to go to all that work, so they just collect their odd-shaped rubber blobs, add a little fresh rubber to stick it all together into a mass, then saw it into chunks & sell it that way. It brings a little less money, but is a fair amount less work, too--although still enough work.