Farms in Niue

If you are interested in botany and horticulture you can take some time to visit the esperimental farm at Vaipapahi near the village of Toi, North of the Island. It is nothing special or impressive but it is interesting to see the experimentations that are going on in Niue in the agricultural sector. One of the biggest problems of Niue, is that the Island is too rocky, and there aren't too many places with good soil to plant. So, the government decided to do these experimentations to find plants that may adapt to the soil and may become commercially viable.

What is interesting in this farm is the many different species of plants which are spread not too farm from each other. You don't have to walk too much to see what they had sucessifuly grown over there. The down side during our visit, was that we couldn'd find anyone to guide us or give information about what kind of plants are there, neither to talk about the results abtained with the experimentation. Prior our visit, we passed by the Tourist Office in Alofi, and the lady said for us to just walk in the farm and we were going to find someone over there. Nope, we found nobody, but we could hear someone using a machine in the far away distance (really far away). From the species we know, we could reconise Vanilla (photo), Mango, Coconut, Jackfruit, Nano fruit, and also we saw many others, but didn't know their names. Maybe you have more luck than us finding someone to explain things a bit better.  Just to let you know, we had to leave the place runing in full speed due the amount of flies in the area. (There were about 15 flies landed in each of my legs disputing every inch of it. It was November, and we don't know if it is like that all year round. We hope not). 

In the central part of the island just beside the road, you will be able to see Taro plantations (photo). They are on both sides of the Road from Alofi to Liku. Further South, there is the spetacular looking Noni plantation. They produce Noni juice for export and it is one of the few produces exported from Niue. Also, driving the road around the Island you will see smalls plantations including coconut palms and casava. Well, there isn't much going on in terms of plantations in Niue, which impressed us very much because in other countries of the South Pacific, plantations can be found everywhere. It was a shock for us to see so much land unused, even people saying the soil is not the best, but in this case Niue is very green with big trees and a large variety of plants. It seems to be more a lack of will than anything else. But we are not expert on the subject.