Oil palm
| Oil palm | |
|---|---|
 | |
| African Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| Family: | Arecaceae |
| Subfamily: | Arecoideae |
| Tribe: | Cocoeae |
| Genus: | Elaeis Jacq. |
| Species | |
| Elaeis guineensis | |
The oil palms (Elaeis) comprise two species of the Arecaceae, or palm family. They are used in commercial agriculture in the production of palm oil. The African Oil Palm Elaeis guineensis is native to West Africa, occurring between Angola and Gambia, while the American Oil Palm Elaeis oleifera is native to tropical Central America and South America. The generic name is derived from the Greek for oil, elaion, while the species name refers to its country of origin.
Mature trees are single-stemmed, and grow to 20 m tall. The leaves are pinnate, and reach between 3-5 m long. A young tree produces about 30 leaves a year. Established trees over 10 years produce about 20 leaves a year. The flowers are produced in dense clusters; each individual flower is small, with three sepals and three petals.
The palm fruit takes five to six months to mature from pollination to maturity. The palm fruit is reddish, about the size of a large plum and grows in large bunches. Each fruit is made up of an oily, fleshy outer layer (the pericarp), with a single seed (the palm kernel), also rich in oil. When ripe, each bunch of fruit weigh 40-50 kilogrammes.
Oil is extracted from both the pulp of the fruit (palm oil, an edible oil) and the kernel (palm kernel oil, used in foods and for soap manufacture). For every 100 kilograms of fruit bunches, typically 22 kilograms of palm oil and 1.6 kilograms of palm kernel oil can be extracted.
The high oil yield of oil palm trees (as high as 7,250 liters per hectare per year) has made it a common cooking ingredient in southeast Asia and the tropical belt of Africa. Its increasing use in the commercial food industry in other parts of the world is buoyed by its cheaper pricing, the high oxidative stability of the refined product and high levels of natural antioxidants.
Since palm oil contains more saturated fats than oils made from canola, corn, linseed, soybeans, safflower, and sunflowers, it can withstand extreme deep-frying heat and resists oxidation.
Planting
For each hectare of oil palm, which is harvested year-round, the annual production averages 10 tonnes of fruit yielding 3,000 kg of pericarp oil and 750 kg of seed kernels yielding 250 kg of high quality palm kernel oil as well as 500 kg of kernel meal. Palm fronds and kernel meal are processed for use as livestock feed.
All modern, commercial planting material consists of tenera palms or DxP hybrids, which are obtained by crossing thickshelled dura with shell-less pisifera. Although common commercial pre-germinated seed is as thick-shelled as the dura mother tree, the resulting tree will produce thin-shelled tenera fruit. An alternative to pre-germinated seed, once constraints to mass production are overcome, is tissue-cultured or “clonal” palms which provide “true copies” of high yielding DxP palms.
It is essential for an oil palm nursery to have an uninterrupted supply of clean water and topsoil which is both well-structured and sufficiently deep to accommodate three rounds of on-site bag-filling. Approximately 35 ha can grow enough seedlings over a three-year period to plant a 5,000 ha plantation. Pre-nursery seedlings must be watered daily. Whenever rainfall is less than 10 mm per day, irrigation is required, and the system must be capable of uniformly applying 6.5 mm water per day.
Pre-nursery seedlings in the four-leaf stage of development (10 to 14 weeks after planting) are usually transplanted to the main nursery, after their gradual adjustment to full sunlight and rigid selection process. During culling, seedlings that have “grassy”, “crinkled”, “twisted”, or “rolled” leaves are discarded.
Weeds growing in the polybags must be carefully pulled out. Herbicides should not be used. Numerous insects (e.g., ants, armyworm, bagworm, aphids, thrips, mites, grasshoppers, mealybugs) and vertebrates (e.g., rats, squirrels, porcupine, wild boar, monkeys) are pests in oil palm nurseries and must be carefully identified before control measures are implemented.
After eight months in the nursery, normal healthy plants should be 0.8–1 m in height and display 5 to 8 functional leaves.
Crop nutrient
Cross-breeding
Disease
Basal stem rot, caused by the fungus ganoderma, is the most serious disease of oil palm in Malaysia and Indonesia. Previously, research on basal stem rot was hampered by the failure to artificially infect oil palm with the fungus. Although Ganoderma had been associated with BSR (Thompson, 1931), proof of its pathogenicity to satisfy Koch’s postulate was only achieved in the early 1990s by inoculating oil palm seedling roots (Ariffin and Idris, 1991) or by using rubber wood blocks (Khairuddin, 1990). A reliable and quick technique for testing the pathogenicity of the Ganoderma fungus by inoculating oil palm germinated seeds.
This fatal disease can lead to losses as much as 80% after repeated planting cycles. Ganoderma produces enzymes that degrade the oil palm tissue and affect the infected oil palm xylem thus causing serious problems to the distribution of water and other nutrients to the top of the palm tree. Ganoderma infection is well defined by its lesion in the stem. The cross section of infected palm stem shows that the lesion appears as a light brown area of rotting tissue with a distinctive irregularly shaped darker band at the borders of this area. The infected tissue become as an ashen-grey powdery and if the palm remains standing, the infected trunk rapidly become hollow.
In a 2007 study in Portugal, scientists suggest control of ganoderma on oil palms would benefit from further consideration of the process as one of white rot. Ganoderma are extraordinary organisms capable exclusively of degrading lignin to carbon dioxide and water: celluloses are then available as nutrients for the fungus. It is necessary to consider this mode of attack as a white rot involving lignin biodegradation, for integrated control. The existing literature does not report this area and appears to be concerned particularly with the mode of spread and molecular biology of ganoderma. The white rot perception opens up new fields in breeding/selecting for resistant cultivars of oil palms with high lignin content, ensuring the conditions for lignin decomposition are reduced, and simply sealing damaged oil palms to stop decay. It is likely that spread is by spores rather than roots. The knowledge gained can be employed in the rapid degradation of oil palm waste on the plantation floor by inoculating suitable fungi, and/or treating the waste more appropriately (e.g. chipping and spreading over the floor rather than windrowing).
Endophytic bacteria are organisms inhabiting plant organs that at some time in their life cycle can colonize the internal plant tissues without causing apparent harm to the host. Introducing endophytic bacteria to the roots to control plant disease is to manipulate the indigenous bacterial communities of the roots in a manner, which leads to enhanced suppression of soil-born pathogens. The use of endophytic bacteria should thus be preferred to other biological control agents as they are internal colonizers, with better ability to compete within the vascular systems, limiting Ganoderma for both nutrients and space during its proliferation. Two bacterial isolates Burkholderia cepacia(B3) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa(P3) were selected for evaluation in the glasshouse for their efficacy in enhancing growth and subsequent suppression of the spread of BSR in oil palm seedlings.
Little leaf syndrome has not been fully explained but has often been confused with Boron deficiency. The growing point is damaged, sometimes by Oryctes beetle. Small, distorted leaves that resemble Boron deficiency emerge. This is often followed by secondary pathogenic infections in the spear that can lead to spear rot and palm death.
History
Research
In the 1960s, research and development (R&D) in oil palm breeding began to expand after Malaysia's Department of Agriculture established an exchange program with West African economies and four private plantations formed the Oil Palm Genetics Laboratory. The government also established Kolej Serdang, which became the Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (UPM) in the 1970s to train agricultural and agro-industrial engineers and agro-business graduates to conduct research in the field.
In 1979, following strong lobbying from oil palm planters and support from the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) and UPM, the government set up the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (Porim). B.C. Sekhar was instrumental in Porim's recruitment and training of scientists to undertake R&D in oil palm tree breeding, palm oil nutrition and potential oleochemical use. Sekhar, as founder and chairman, strategised Porim to be a public-and-private-coordinated institution. As a result, Porim (renamed Malaysian Palm Oil Board in 2000) became Malaysia's top research entity with the highest technology commercialisation rate of 20% compared to 5% among local universities. While MPOB has gained international prominence, its relevance is dependent on it churning out breakthrough findings in the world's fast-changing oil crop genetics, dietary fat nutrition and process engineering landscape.
Palm oil production
Social and environmental impacts
Carbon balance
Palm biomass as fuel
Some scientists and companies are going beyond using just the oil, and are proposing to convert fronds, empty fruit bunches and palm kernel shells harvested from oil palm plantations into renewable electricity, cellulosic ethanol, biogas, biohydrogen and bioplastic. Thus, by using both the biomass from the plantation as well as the processing residues from palm oil production (fibers, kernel shells, palm oil mill effluent), bioenergy from palm plantations can have an effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Examples of these production techniques have been registered as projects under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.
By using palm biomass to generate renewable energy, fuels and biodegradable products, both the energy balance and the greenhouse gas emissions balance for palm biodiesel is improved. For every tonne of palm oil produced from fresh fruit bunches, a farmer harvests around 6 tonnes of waste palm fronds, 1 tonne of palm trunks, 5 tonnes of empty fruit bunches, 1 tonne of press fiber (from the mesocarp of the fruit), half a tonne of palm kernel endocarp, 250 kg of palm kernel press cake, and 100 tonnes of palm oil mill effluent. Some oil palm plantations incinerate biomass to generate power for palm oil mills. Some other oil palm plantations yield large amount of biomass that can be recycled into medium density fibreboards and light furniture. In efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scientists treat palm oil mill effluent to extract biogas. After purification, biogas can substitute for natural gas for use at factories. Anaerobic treatment of palm oil mill effluent, practiced in Malaysia and Indonesia, results in domination of Methanosaeta concilii. It plays an important role in methane production from acetate and the optimum condition for its growth should be considered to harvest biogas as renewable fuel.
Unfortunately, palm oil has detrimental effects on the environment and is not considered to be a sustainable biofuel. The deforestation occurring throughout Malaysia and Indonesia as a result of the growing demand for this plant has made scarce natural habitats for Orangutan and other rainforest dwellers. More carbon is released during the life cycle of a palm oil plant to its use as a biofuel than is emitted by the same volume of fossil fuels.
Malayan folkculture
Since the days when the 'guineesis' was first introduced by the British, Indian laborers were brought in to work the estates. It was there that Hindu beliefs mixed with the local Malay culture and started the usage of palm seeds by traditional healers suffixed with tok 'bomoh' or 'pawang' in the local language. It was found that every bunch of palm fruit usually bears a single 'illustrious' seed which looks like a shiny black pearl called 'sbatmi' in Tamil and 'shakti' in Malay. These are used as accessories by the 'bomoh' and 'pawang' in the mixed ritual for peace with nature as these are believed to contain mystical healing properties, and those wearing it are blessed by nature.
Modern usage has seen more common people keeping these as a charm/fashion item to feel at peace, owing to its use by celebrities. All palm seeds contain acid and these sbatmi are no different and should be handled with care. Sbatmi lost some popularity when it was used in a grisly ritual by Mona Fandey in 1993.
See also
References
External links
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