Tissue-Cultured Bananas: Uniform And High-Yielding

Establishing a healthy orchard starts with choosing the correct plant material. In South Africa’s only laboratory of its type, banana plants are cultivated from tissue culture to produce clones that offer farmers vigorous growth and high yield. Lindi Botha visited Du Roi Laboratory in Limpopo.

- Lindi Botha

In a unique laboratory in Letsitele, Limpopo, a team of technicians is quietly at work creating what will grow to become South Africa’s entire banana crop. The process seems more related to medical science than agriculture: the employees, wearing face masks and gloves and wielding scalpels, work in an ultra-sterile environment, slicing and duplicating banana tissue culture as the first step to producing a high-yielding, disease-free banana plantation.

The plants are produced in Du Roi Laboratory through rapid multiplication of tissue culture, which offers farmers the benefit of converting or expanding plantations quickly and efficiently with superior selections of plants that are true to type.

“The benefit of tissue- cultured plants is that they are uniform, so they grow at the same pace and are ready to harvest at the same time. It makes management of the plantation that much easier,” says Suné Wiltshire, the laboratory’s general manager.

WHERE IT ALL BEGINS

The starting point is a 4ha mother block, established for many years, that includes the varieties proven to possess the best characteristics. This is crucial, says Wiltshire, as the tissue culture process is a clone of the mother plant.

“What you put in, you get out. When we select for commercial plants, we look for a faster cycle, a more cylindrical bunch and a shorter plant that is easier to manage. All our mother plants need to have these traits so that the suckers we multiply using the tissue culture process have them too.”