Sisal is a tough plant. It can thrive in drought conditions and in rough land with very little nutrition. For example, in 100 years of commercial sisal growing in Tanzania there has not been a year when there was a drought to kill sisal plants but there have been years when lack of rain devastated many other crops. Drought is the worst enemy of agriculture in many of the developing economies, which rely heavily on rain fed agriculture.

It has very few diseases which in most cases does not need any pesticides. It helps to stop soil erosion and captures moisture from the atmosphere. It can be planted any time of the year and harvested throughout the year. It even survives fire. There are very few commercially grown plants in the world with these qualities.

These are very serious advantages for an agricultural product especially in poor areas which are continually ravaged by drought, plant diseases, bush fires; where agriculture is the mainstay of their economies but is still primitive and has no protection of state subsidies or insurance.

The concentration of development has been in the utilization of the fibre. Only 2 percent of the plant is extracted as fibre. In the worldwide production of fibre of 300,000 tons, about 15,000,000 million tons is the biomass and short fibres called "waste".

Research has been going on to establish how best to exploit this huge quantity of biomass commercially.

Harvesting is carried out by hand. All lower leaves, standing at an angle of more than 45 degrees to the vertical, are cut away from the bole of the plant with a sharp flexible knife. After harvesting, the leaves are transported to a central factory and decorticated to extract the cortex of ribbon fibres that run along the length of the leaves. Extracted fibres are extensively washed during decortication, sun dried, brushed to separate and align the individual strands of fibre, graded and packed into bales.

Until recently only 2% of the sisal plant was considered to be useful, however recent researches show that the remaining 98 per cent have potential economic value including the generation of electricity from sisal waste which has been discarded in the past.

• Care & Cleaning
• Sisal Guard & Sisal Care
• Installation
• Life Cycle

For more information about this product line please call, come by our store or email us.