Does Rubber Grow on Trees?

Well, actually, it kinda does. Like maple syrup, rubber is harvest from a tree by carving a notch out of it and collecting the sap. Here in this picture you can see a day’s worth of rubber dripping from the tree into a (usually a coconut) cup.

As I’m told, a common farm usually has several thousand rubber trees and each of them yields roughly 1 Baht of rubber per day. Around here thousands of baht per day is a phenomenal amount of money, but still to earn it that means you have to collect the rubber from each tree, scraping the cups clean of the white sap, thousands of times over. From there the rubber still needs to be processed and flattened into sheets. Driving around here the farms you can see what looks like white car floor mats hung out to dry like clothing; that’s the form in which the farms sell the rubber to the factories.

I’m still unclear on how profitable a rubber tree farm is though; it takes seven years for the farm to mature and the trees to grow big enough to harvest. I'll know more soon however, next Wednesday I'm going to my family's rubber tree farm to really see how the farm works.