Increasing Palm Oil Yields by Measuring Oil Recovery Efficiency From the Fields to the Mills

T Oil palm has been commercially cultivated in South East Asia for more than a century to produce crude palm oil (CPO, or oil) and palm kernels (PK, or kernel). The primary products are the fresh fruit bunches (FFB) that are perishable and once harvested must be processed rapidly to extract the oil and the kernel. In other perishable crops like cassava and sugarcane, which must be processed rapidly after harvesting, the primary products are delivered to the processing plant or mill, weighed and analyzed to determine the amount of extractable final product i.e. starch or sugar. The producers are paid according to estimated final product content of their crop and therefore have a strong incentive to improve it. Furthermore, producers receive information on the product content of individual lots arriving at the mills. Consequently they are able to equate management practices and block characteristics with quality; hence they can improve the quality of the primary product. Similarly, the efficiency of mills in terms of their ability to extract starch or sugar can be evaluated if the quality of the product entering the mills is known. In oil palm, the FFB received at palm oil mills is graded for ripeness and other criteria that may affect the milling process and oil extraction rate (OER). However, there is no estimate of the oil content of the FFB received. The palm oil mills process FFB of unknown oil content from many sources, and then estimate the OER based on the amount of oil they produce. Thus, in the current system, while FFB yield can be attributed to specific blocks by growers, the OER is not determined for individual blocks or even estates: it is assigned indiscriminately using the average OER of the mill which receives FFB from many sources and blocks. On the basis of “what you cannot measure you cannot manage”, oil palm growers can, and do, manage their plantings to maximize FFB yield, but not OER. The International Plant Nutrition Institute’s Southeast Asia Program (IPNI SEAP) has shown that when best management practices (BMPs) are implemented in the field to maximize FFB yield, OER may not necessarily be maximized at the same time (Oberthür et. al., 2012). Furthermore, there is no total oil balance at the mill based on total oil arriving in the FFB and oil eventually extracted from the FFB. Hence, milling efficiency is not normally evaluated on an overall balance of oil entering the mill and oil produced, but through estimates of losses in different stages of the process. IPNI SEA recently showed that by combining bunch analysis (BA) data with harvest audit data, growers can compute their Field Oil Recovery Efficiency (FORE) and the Estimated Oil Content (EOC) of the harvested FFB delivered to the mill. The FORE is of the efficiency with which the oil produced in the field is recovered at harvest. The efficiency would be 100% if all bunches were harvested, the bunches were harvested ripe or mature and there were no losses of loose fruits (Donough et. al., 2013). Thus estimates of FORE provide information on the efficiency of the harvesting operations in recovering oil. The pre-milling EOC of the FFB received for processing will allow mills to measure their Mill Oil Recovery Efficiency (MORE), which is a better indicator of mill performance than OER per se. Use of recovery efficiency measures in the field and at the mill will allow a more holistic and inclusive analysis of the overall oil recovery, clearly describing the efficiency of operations managed in the field and at the mill. Knowledge of EOC will also allow mills to pay growers for the oil content of their crop, which in turn will stimulate growers to improve FORE. A virtuous cycle of estimating potential product contents of individual FFB deliveries and using the information to improve crop recovery in the plantation may thus start. In this paper, we present the conceptual definitions and framework for assessing oil recovery efficiency (ORE) starting from the field until the mill.