Extending their crops could revolutionise life for poor mango farmers, writes Jewel Topsfield.
It's still weeks away from mango season in Indonesia but you wouldn't know it at Sukadana village in North Lombok. The mango trees are pregnant with almost-ripe fruit; bamboo poles at rakish angles prop up groaning branches. There is a miraculous feel to this bountiful harvest. If you saw the awed expression on farmer Muksin Hadi's face you'd swear he'd just witnessed an act of God. "It's amazing," he keeps saying.
But these off-season mangoes are not an act of God, they are the act of a chemical called Cultar. Applied once a year to mango trees, Cultar, or paclobutrazol, retards the growth of stems and leaves. This means the trees flower earlier and more profusely and bear fruit before the start of the official season. This is a godsend in a country where the market is flooded with cheap fruit during the peak season of   October to   December. 
Although mangoes are Indonesia's largest fruit crop, many growers have small farms and are poor. One of the most common mango varieties in Indonesia - Arumanis - has an image problem overseas. They are sweet, juicy and low in fibre but the skin remains green when ripe, which makes export difficult to countries only familiar with golden ripe mangoes. Arumanis and other local varieties are extremely popular in Indonesia. "But the price crashes when you have this banjir mangga (flood of mangoes) and no one makes any money," says international mango consultant Ian Baker. The market price in East Java and West Nusa Tenggara (which includes Lombok) during peak season is 2000-2500 Rupiah (20 to 25 cents) a kilogram.
This is where a little known partnership between the Indonesian and Australian governments comes in. Eastern Indonesia - where 60 to 80 per cent of farmers are poor or near-poor - has long been a focus of Australian aid. "Mangoes are one of the key cash crops in the dry parts of Eastern Indonesia because they survive drought," Baker says.
In 2007, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research asked Baker to investigate how to help poor farmers in the region. He discovered farmers in wealthier parts - Pemalang in Central Java and Cirebon in West Java - were already using the early flowering technology to extend their harvests. The experiment was so successful they were removing their rice crops and planting mangoes. Baker, a former scientist and mango farmer in the Northern Territory, had used Cultar on his own crops of Kensington Pride since the late '80s. "Pretty much every farmer in Australia I know uses Cultar because you are always chasing a higher price earlier in the season," he says. But a small 2008 trial in North Lombok showed Arumanis mangoes are far more receptive to Cultar than Kensington Prides. "In Australia, you are lucky to get them to flower three weeks early," Baker says. The Arumanis would flower up to three months early and required only about a sixth of the Cultar dosage. And remarkably, unlike any other variety Baker had come across, some Arumanis trees in Lombok flowered up to three times a year. This meant the crop didn't fail even if flowers were destroyed by rain or disease because the trees would simply flower again. "This doesn't happen in Vietnam or in the Philippines or in Australia. It was almost like a magic bullet."
In 2014 the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Promoting Rural Income through Support for Markets in Agriculture (AIP-PRISMA) teamed up with Swiss agrochemical company Syngenta. The program vision is lofty. It hopes that by 2018, 25,000 of the the 157,000 mango farmers in West Nusa Tenggara and East Java will have adopted the crop treatment technology. This involves not just the annual application of Cultar but also using fungicide every 10 days or so and the regular use of insecticide. Farmers are also taught to prune and fertilise every year. Ideally these measures will improve the quality of the fruit and extend the mango season to   August.
This month is the first harvest under the program. It's been delayed by six weeks or so because of heavy rain in   May that devastated the first flowers. The take-up in the first year has been modest - about 400 farmers in West Nusa Tenggara and 3100 in East Java.
North Lombok mango grower Raden Nyakradi knows about 100 farmers who signed up for the program last   December. However he says only 30 remain because of the expense of the chemicals and the work involved. "It's worth it, of course, because there is no success without big effort," Raden says. "But others want to see the proof first."
Agronomist Muji Rahayu from the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development, says the Indonesian government "definitely" supports a program that could increase farmers' incomes. "It's good, of course, but there is still one issue," Muji says. "It's the use of chemical stuff, especially the pest control. The community is concerned about the chemicals and the government has a program of using green technology."
Baker has also come up against a resistance to the use of chemicals. "Indonesians have an innate scepticism of anything that goes against nature," he says. "Nature is not having mangoes in   August."
Dr Zainuri, a lecturer, researcher and consultant at the University of Mataram in Lombok, says no chemical residue has been detected on the fruit, so it should be safe. The program is trying to teach farmers to wear protective clothing when they spray - even if it's just motorcycle helmets and raincoats. "But they feel it's uncomfortable, so they just wear normal clothes." And as Muji points out, this safety message serves to further alarm farmers about the dangers of chemicals.
Sojati, a mango farmer and the chief of Sukadana village in North Lombok, says mangoes had been wasted because the quality of the fruit was so poor due to pests and fungus. "We couldn't sell them, we even cut down the mango trees," he says. "The fertiliser and the treatment they do to the trees is so they have better quality and can harvest twice a year.
"I think more farmers will sign up next year. That's my hope that, as village chief, others will follow."