Google might be your best friend. Is Sierra Leone in Hawaii? Do you actually NEED, or do you WANT? Huge difference.

Sounds like you are a commercial grower, and most of us here are just back yard gardeners. Maybe you should check with the AG wholesalers.

Suzi

Sierra Leone is in Africa. Finding 5 million pineapple suckers won't be easy. You'd probably have to go to a large number of growers and see how many spares they can come up with. Good luck.

Google has helped. Looks like tissue cultured plants is the best option for such a large number, but for how much it will cost ($0.50) I can build a tissue culture lab and grow the plants on site. My neighbor runs a not for profit that has built a mango packing plant in Sierra Leone to provide economic resources to the region. Unfortunately mangos only fruit two months of the year. The other large crop in the area is pineapple, but there is not enough plants in the continent to plant the scale of production they need. Land, farmers, facilities is not the lacking resources, it is availability of so many starter plants that is preventing ramped up production. As a Bioengineer, my neighbor asked me to look into ideas.

Cheers,
Werner J Stiegler

Google has helped. Looks like tissue cultured plants is the best option for such a large number, but for how much it will cost ($0.50) I can build a tissue culture lab and grow the plants on site. My neighbor runs a not for profit that has built a mango packing plant in Sierra Leone to provide economic resources to the region. Unfortunately mangos only fruit two months of the year. The other large crop in the area is pineapple, but there is not enough plants in the continent to plant the scale of production they need. Land, farmers, facilities is not the lacking resources, it is availability of so many starter plants that is preventing ramped up production. As a Bioengineer, my neighbor asked me to look into ideas.

Cheers,
Werner J Stiegler

We have a lot of under utilised mango packing plants that lie idle a lot of the year. That's why some people are going into lime production as the same packing facilities are suitable for the limes as well. And they need fewer plants per hectare than they would with pineapples :O)

Limes, I will have to look into that. Thank you for the feedback. Cheers, Werner

Limes, I will have to look into that. Thank you for the feedback. Cheers, Werner

Don't they have humming birds in Africa? If they do pineapples might not be a good idea, they would get seedy. Hence the growing of commercial pineapples in hawaii, no humming birds.