Where do the pineapples you eat come from? Some of you quickly answer, "the can." Thanks, genius. If you eat processed pineapple products such as canned pineapples or pineapple juice, its likely you've eaten a product of Indonesia. Indonesia is the home of the 39,000 hectare (nearly 100,000 acre) Great Giant Pineapple Company, the supplier of 15% of the world's pineapples and the largest pineapple farm in the world. I recently made a trip to south Sumatra to visit this farm.
Where do these pineapples grow? Some of you quickly answer, "on pineapple trees." Wrong. Pineapples grow out of the top of a grassy,
shrub-like plant that gets about waist-tall. The pineapples emerge out of the top and are
pickable after about a year's growth. After one pineapple is picked, the plant will produce a second and smaller pineapple. After two fruits the plant is chopped up and new "tops" are planted.
Pineapples don't grow from seeds, put rather from "tops." Tops are harvested from the top of the pineapple fruit and then placed back into the ground, where they grow and produce new pineapple plants.
Pineapples are harvested using a large, two-winged contraption. Laborers walk along picking the fruits and placing them on the wings' conveyor belts. The conveyor belts carry the fruits into trucks.
Time for a middle-of-the-day nap. Two-layer thick clothing (pineapple leaves are sharp) adds to the already overbearing heat. The Great Giant Pineapple Factory has more than 15,000 employees and harvests more than 2,000 tons of pineapples every day, all year long.
The "tops" are unloaded and will be reused for the next plantings.
I almost felt like I was in Kansas when I saw this scene. It's very rare to see tractors in Indonesia. Almost all farm labor here is done by muscle-power or water buffalo.
This factory at the center of the farm produces canned pineapple and pineapple juice. When the product leaves the factory its still unbranded, but is then bought up and labeled by brands like Dole, Del Monte, and others, and then shipped to countries like the USA. From this factory in the center of the farm, you can drive 20 miles one
direction and see nothing by pineapple fields, and drive for 20 miles in the other direction and only see pineapple fields. Thinking about how big it is almost makes you go fruity.
