Testing of Ethylene Stimulation to Enhance Latex Yield of Hevea Brasiliensis Clone RRIM 600 in Southern Thailand

Recently, latex price has continuously increased, This motivates rubber smallholders in southern Thailand to increase latex productivity. Then, ethylene stimulation has been introduced in tapping systems. Therefore, it needs to be tested before recommendation to the smallholder. An experiment was established at Thepa Research Station, Songkhla province. Rubber clone RRIM 600 (20 year-old) was used in the experiment. The experiment was designed as one-tree-plot design with 20 replicates. There was 6 treatments: 1) 1/3S­ 2d/3 (C), 2) 1/8S­ 1d/3, 3)1/8S­ 1d/3 + RRIMFLOW (RF), 4)1/8S­ 1d/3 + LET (LET), 5) 1/8S­ 1d/3 + Double Tex (DT) and 6) 1/8S­ 1d/3 + Ethyphon 5% (E). The experimental period was during June 2010 to February 2011. It was found that the RF treatment provided the highest rubber productivity (137.7 g/tree/tapping and 5.9 kg/tree/year), and it was significantly different from the remaining treatments. According to latex diagnosis, sucrose in the RF treatment trended to decrease, but inorganic phosphate and thiol trended to increase