Oil Palm Podcast

As we know, harvesting in oil palm was highly labor intensive. And in our region, the laborers were mostly foreigner. The pandemic has affected the availability of this workforce. Each harvester can roughly harvest about 1.5 to 2.5 MT FFB per day. If we know the number of harvester available, we can work out the amount of fruit harvested.

What are the benefits of having automation in oil palm plantation management? Firstly, the workflow efficiencies would improve which is going to bring down the cost of production. Secondly, oil palm industry has been labor intensive until today. However as a resource, labor is becoming more and more expensive. Automation would strive to cut down labor usage.

Today, planters were thinking of abandoning the field, replant oil palm with other crops, selling the farm, lease out the farm and many other measures. There was a lost of faith in this golden crop.

In recent years, labor constraint has been a hot topic which everyone talks about. Planters realized that there just wasn’t any cheap labor in the market anymore. Labor constraint is a dilemma which nobody enjoys talking about. Sadly, this problem is not going away anytime soon.

Frond snapping has a huge impact on the yield of oil palm plantation. It was detrimental to the production. Many planters asked what causes the frond snapping, which I am sharing my observations here.