Recently, the prices of palm oil fresh fruit bunches (FFB) have been at an all-time high – With the increase in oil palm fresh fruit prices, plantations are at risk of losing output whether it is due to pilferage, uncollected crops, or lack of data that is useful for daily monitoring.
While agriculture technology encompasses automation and various upcoming IR4.0 technologies, cloud computing is still one of the advancements that takes centre stage in the digitalisation process.
How does an agriculture cloud platform help plantation managers safeguard and increase efficiency in evacuating collected harvests from estate grounds?
Minimise uncollected fruits through visibility
Operational visibility helps identify where, why, and how to tackle the issue of uncollected fruit bunches in the estates. With estate production data immediately available, plantations can identify blocks that are prone to crop backlogs and take immediate actions to minimise or prevent the backlogs.
This is crucial as the late collection of harvests can easily lead to fruit spoilage, especially if the fruits do not arrive at the palm oil mill within 24 hours. Fruits left on the field can also be exposed to theft and pilferage due to its high market price.
The right cloud platform should automate the entire palm oil value chain from nursery to headquarters, not just parts of it. With Quarto by LintraMax, estate supervisors can inspect day-to-day tasks, including general work, crop quality, and field inspection via photo uploads using an offline in-the-field mobile app that can be installed on any smartphone.
Managers get better visibility into processes to improve crop harvesting, fruit collection, and despatch to mills. A platform workflow such as this makes escalating issues to drive resolutions hassle-free.
Precision Plantation mapping for quick actions
In estates, managers have access to drone maps on one hand and dozens of business reports on another, including finance and operational data. The tasks of assessing and comparing land division to assess performance in terms of fruit output, worker productivity versus expenses spent are completely manual.
With a robust plantation mapping solution, critical real-time plantation metrics are made available for easy viewing directly on digital maps. Estate managers can locate overdue crops, track intervals between harvests and check yield production while managing planting expenses.
Plantation data by blocks, fields, divisions is quantified instantly in the system and accessible from anywhere to ensure time-conscience actions, such as evacuating harvests, can be taken immediately.
Complete traceability and monitoring
With an end-to-end digital platform such as Quarto, plantations get full traceability every step of the way from in-the-field activities to estate offices.
Once fresh fruit bunches are harvested, data including geotagging is attached. This data can be visualised on our mapping solution in Quarto, near real-time. This provides full traceability from evacuation to despatch, with the ability to cross-check fresh fruit tonnage from estates to mills. Any discrepancies can be traced back, reported, and monitored for actionable steps in managing the difference and preventing this from happening again.
The ability to view trends in discrepancies could also provide a bigger indication of whether the loss of fresh fruits has been or could be an ongoing issue. If so, greater measures can be undertaken to ensure the plantation output reaches the desirable level again.
Discover in detail how a digital agriculture solution like Quarto can help reduce your oil palm estate losses! Contact us and let’s start the conversation.
This content is provided by LintraMax (M) Sdn Bhd
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