What palm oil modernisation looks like

Agriculture has changed beyond all recognition in the last 50 years. In the race to feed more people, the sector has had to rapidly adapt and industrialise to improve efficiency, increase yields and become more economically sustainable. 

Such progress has come at a considerable cost, however, both for people and the planet. Large-scale monoculture and the extensive use of chemical inputs have simplified ecosystems, leading to a decline in plant and animal species. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation agrees that industrial agriculture is a major contributor to biodiversity loss, with an estimated 75% of global crop varieties lost during the last 100 years.

Widespread use of pesticides and fertilisers has polluted soil, water and air. Agricultural runoff has caused great harm to aquatic ecosystems, and pesticide residues detected in food have given us all cause for concern. And the relentless pursuit of higher yields has often come at the expense of soil health. Intensive ploughing, for instance, has drastically degraded soils. Now, around a third of the world’s arable land is classified as degraded, according to WWF.

Changing land use has had an impact too. In Malaysia for example, the government’s poverty alleviation schemes targeted at poor rural communities during the 1960s drove the cultivation of oil palm plantations across the country, replacing rubber and other agricultural crops.

“That’s simply because palm is far more productive and economically viable – and there has been a real demand for edible oils and fats around the world,” says Dr David Ross Appleton, chief R&D officer at Sime Darby Plantation (SDP).

In oil palm cultivation, doing more with less is key. Since the early 2000s, and the launch of certification schemes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), eliminating deforestation from palm oil supply chains has been a real focus. The sector, facing the dual challenge of meeting the global demand for the versatile commodity – used in everything from food to toothpaste – while addressing the environmental and social concerns associated with its production, has found it tough. But finding ways to produce more palm oil on existing plantations is fuelling research, development and innovation in the sector.

And the sector continues to modernise. Buoyed and encouraged by certification, traceability demands, sustainable land use and zero-deforestation commitments, many big players in the industry are focused on a transition towards more responsible, environmentally-friendly practices.

Precision agriculture techniques, satellite imagery, drones and geographic information system (GIS) mapping are being employed to monitor and manage plantations more efficiently. These technologies provide real-time data on soil health, crop conditions and yield predictions, helping planters to make better and more informed decisions and optimise resources better.

Many are making use of improved planting practices and the cultivation of high-yielding oil palm varieties. Planting materials are being more carefully selected to ensure better resistance to diseases and pests, which leads to increased yields per hectare. The use of genomic selection techniques for propagation is helping planters produce genetically uniform and disease-free seedlings, which boosts the overall health and productivity of plantations.

The palm oil industry has also found innovative, circular ways to use by-products, such as palm kernel cake and empty fruit bunches, to make bioenergy, organic fertiliser and animal feed.

For SDP, a company that holds over 570,000 hectares of oil palm plantations across Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands (for context, close to 29m hectares of oil palm is cultivated globally), modernising is essential to its long-term sustainability as a business. It has been implementing measures to modernise since the 1980s when it focused on ridding its operations of highly polluting slash and burn activity to clear existing plantations prior to replanting. 

“Developing agronomic techniques to help break down the trunks and provide nutrition for the palms that you were about to plant – that’s been going on for decades,” Appleton says. “Integrated pest management and modern integrated agricultural processes were adopted for palm back then and that has continued.” 

The other long-running activity the company continues to carry out is its breeding programme to find the highest yielding of palm, a practice that has been ongoing since the 1950s.

More recently, the focus has been on improving the way manual work is done in oil palm plantations through mechanisation, automation and digitalisation. In Malaysia, such work is often undertaken by readily available cheap, foreign labour and thus there has been no real push to replace people with machines in the plantations. Unlike an annual crop such as maize, which is planted in a big, flat, rectangular-shaped field and harvesting involves removing everything that has been planted, palm is more complicated. “Palm is quite dynamic, so it’s very difficult to replace a person who can walk around and interact with the environment when they’re cutting down fresh fruit bunches,” Appleton says. 

However, it is work that fewer people are willing to do. While plantations have invested in mechanised wheelbarrows and tractors, cultivating oil palm is back-breaking work with people largely working with tools similar to those used 40 years previously. 

While Appleton and his team are yet to find a solution that completely replaces the physical act of cutting fresh fruit bunches from oil palms or what is termed as “harvesting”, the company is working hard to replace some of the less skilled non-harvesting jobs. Chemical inputs are done with drones flying over the plantations – a move that has cut the number of workers involved in this process by over 80%. “The drones are much more accurate, so we use less pesticide and saves on costs,” Appleton says. 

To avoid workers having to lift and carry up to 40kg bunches of palm fruit around, the company has invested in tractors with robotic arms. “We’re now looking at automating both the driving of the tractors and controlling the arms. We have a few platforms that we’re developing with start-up companies for autonomous driving in the estates that eventually will be used for distributing things such as fertiliser.”

All of this is good news for the business, of course. But advances in technology are great for workers’ productivity too. The more of the crop they can collect in a day, the more they are paid. While machines are reducing the number of workers needed, people are becoming more skilled in their work, Appleton says. “Workers are learning to operate, maintain and service the machines. They are learning skills that can increase their pay; they are no longer just labourers. And with fewer workers on the plantation, we can pay people more for the work they are doing.”

Making work less laborious in plantations also helps to level the gender playing field. What was traditionally a male dominated industry is now becoming more accessible to women. “There’s a term that is frequently used for oil palm plantations: The three Ds: dirty, dangerous and difficult. It’s a stigma and narrative that we’re changing,” Appleton says. 

Ongoing modernisation is crucial if the palm oil sector is to continue to grow commercial yields. The world wants more and more palm oil, and leading companies in the sector are committed to ensuring such targets aren’t achieved by cultivating new, additional lands. Chasing cheap migrant labour is also not sustainable in the long-term. 

For Appleton, there is still plenty to do when it comes to modernising the actual plantation conditions, and it requires the entire palm oil sector to work together to achieve it. “We must crack this nut and make sure we adapt to the changing world.”