By Jonathan Liu--High School Senior and member of Business Class
On Wednesday December 14, 2011 the AlphaMax Academy business
students went to Jarikaba Stichting Behold Bananen Sector (SBBS). The students
left school at 8:00 am and arrived at the Jarikaba banana plantation forty five
minutes later. When they arrived to the plantation Mr. Barsingh -the head of
agronomic and research department- greeted the student with a warm
welcome.
After a long trip with the bus the business students arrived
at the banana plantation. They then rode three more minutes to the banana
field. Mr. Barsingh described the field and the banana plants. Jarikaba has three farms and each farm has a
manager and two supervisors.
The banana field is 1280 hectares long. One hectare has 1900
banana trees .The banana are covered with blue plastic bags, so that the pests
cannot get to the banana.
The field has an old sprinkler system to water the banana
trees when the field is dry (mostly on hot days). They are trying to put a new
sprinkler system. The banana trees are 1.65 M away from each other and are
planted in a triangular pattern, so that each tree can get the same amount sun
light.
After the field trip the students went to the packinghouse.
There is where the bananas are packed in boxes and shipped to other countries.
In the packing house the bananas are examined to see if the bananas are too
ripe or not ripe. If the banana is not so ripe they are going to export it and
if the banana is ripe the going to sell it to the Suriname local market.
After the examining the bananas they are then thrown into a
pool of water with soap to wash the latex off the banana. The workers then
examine to find out if some of the bananas are rotten. If there are rotten
bananas they throw them away. The
workers throw the bananas back in to another pool of clean water to wash out
the soap .When they are clean the workers pick them up for packing.
The workers
pack the bananas in boxes with two different colors- green and red.
The green
boxes are for small bananas and the red box for larger bananas. Further on, the
air in the boxes with banana is sucked out, so that the bananas won’t ripen
during shipping.
After a long day Mr. Barsingh invited the business students
to sit down and gave the students something to drink and to eat. He also told
the students about some future plans for the banana sector. It was time to go
back to school so the AlphaMax Academy business students thanked Mr. Barsingh
for the tour. The students also got some bananas to bring back home.
