Best Management Practice for Maximum Economic Yield in All Growth Stages of Oil Palm

There are substantial opportunities to increase yield and profitability on existing land through implementation of Best Management Practice (BMP) in oil palm estates. However, plantations are challenged with the identification and implementation of suitable BMP that would promise greatest financial gain. The IPNI Southeast Asia Program (IPNI SEAP, http://seap.ipni.net) has been instrumental in developing a BMP concept that has been successfully evaluated and introduced at larger scale in several estates. IPNI SEAP aims at promoting BMP through collaborative projects in Southeast Asia providing assistance in training, agronomic and economic data analysis, and planning for wider scale implementation of BMP at a commercial scale. A series of six BMP projects established in 2006-2007 with 5 collaborating plantation groups in Indonesia focused on mature oil palms to determine the requirements for achieving maximum economic yield Y-mey. Maximum economic yield in any mature planting is lower than the maximum potential yield Y-max for the site, due to suboptimal practices during plantation establishment that are uneconomic to correct in mature plantations – this is defined as Yield Gap 1. The opportunity to correct Yield Gap 1 comes only during initial plantation establishment and during replanting. As this is not addressed in the current set of BMP projects, a new project is implemented to cover the nursery and immature phase.

Objective: To implement, test and refine the Best Management Practice (BMP) concept for yield intensification in order to increase productivity, profitability, and sustainability of palm oil production in all growth stages of oil palm including nursery, immature and mature development phases of the crop.

Timeline: This project is implemented between 2011 and 2018.

Treatment overview: BMP are implemented in five full-size management blocks in two collaborating plantations in Sumatra (Indonesia) and Sabah (Malaysia) in re-plantings of existing plantations by IPNI and its plantation partners. Results from the BMP implementation are compared to those achieved under standard plantation practices in five reference blocks. At the outset of the research, reference and BMP blocks had similar conditions and performance.

Results to date: In late 2011, BMP implementation at the Sabah project site had produced about 70% of the seedlings for transplanting into the main nursery. The remaining 30% of seedlings will be produced in the pre nursery during 2012. In parallel, land preparation for three BMP blocks and three reference blocks had started in late 2011. Transplanting of seedlings from the main nursery into the field blocks is expected to start in the second half of 2012. Currently, the first data are compiled from monitoring of the pre nursery phase. Databases for the 8 year project are being designed and set up in early 2012. Work on the second site in Sumatra is expected to start in 2012, depending on the replanting schedule of the plantation partner.

Summary: Through this process, estates are enabled to identify better ways to implement BMPs for yield intensification, and decisions on larger investments in BMPs are based on practical, commercial-scale evidence. This project is unique in its design as it is including all growth stages of the oil palm and proposes as monitoring over a period of 8 years.