This research was carried out to evaluate existing agar wounding techniques and to identify viable wounding ways for farmers and other relevant stakeholders in agar plants in order to harvest the valuable end products of agarwood and agar oil, which are used as medicine and incense. The research was conducted in Barlekha Upazila, Moulvibazar district- from August 2017 to February 2018. To conduct the survey, a pre-designed, objective-oriented questionnaire was used, and information was collected from a total of 104 agar farmers, in Barlekha Upazilla, including agar processors, agar orchard owners, and agar tree chips and oil workers by questioning them personally. The study revealed that the respondents mostly utilized two types of wounding techniques; nailing and natural insect infestation. Between these two wounding procedures, the majority of the farmers (87%) practiced the nailing, while the remaining (13%) used to gather wood from natural insect infestation. About 83% of farmers thought that agarwood obtained from natural insect attacks was more profitable than artificial wounding through nailing. The majority of respondents nail the tree when they are 11 to 15 years old. About 86% of respondents in Barlekha Upazila chopped their trees within five years of nailing them. The majority (70%) of the farmers maintained a 2.1-3.0 inch distance for vertical nail pushing, while 64% of the farmers maintained a 1.0-1.5 inch distance for horizontal nail pushing. All the respondents of Barlekha Upazila used the distillation technique for collecting agar oil. Due to the fact that there were no modern techniques to collect agar oil from the wood and atar processing, they were fully dependent on sending the oil abroad for future processing purposes.

Keywords: Wounding techniques, Nailing, Agar oil, Barlekha