Month: February 2020

The demand of activated carbon is increasing every year for many industrial applications such as water purification media, pollutant-gas adsorbent and catalyst support. Recently, many researches are focusing on the production of activated carbon from renewable resources and one of it is the palm kernel shell (PKS). One of the important application of PKS activated … Read more

Rapid composting of accumulated empty fruit bunch (EFB) at palm oil mills is crucial to make composting viable and effective. Many technologies have been developed for rapid composting, but the main challenge is the economic feasibility, mainly caused by the cost of the effective microbes. Therefore, the developed formulation of microbial consortia was isolated with … Read more

Small land holding is one of the factors limiting the independent oil palm growers to increase the production of fresh fruit bunches and income. Therefore, a good land use strategy is needed to fully utilise the farm to ensure it remain sustainable in the future. Intensive integration of dairy goat is a value farming through … Read more

The Malaysian oil palm industry recorded an average oil yield of 3.53 t ha-1 yr-1 in 2017 (MPOB, 2018). It was postulated that the oil palm has the genetic potential of attaining oil yield of up to 18.5 t ha-1 yr-1 (Corley, 1998). To narrow the yield gap, genetic gain through breeding and vegetative propagation … Read more

The oil palm tissue culture (OPTC) process involves many stages that generate enormous amount of information starting from sampling of ortets, culturing of explants, calli, embryoids, polyembryoids, shoots, transplanted ramets and planting in fields. Every OPTC laboratory has its own way of collecting data, from the conventional manual entry into forms, spreadsheets and/or databases etc. … Read more

Marker assisted selection (MAS), is now seen as a viable option in oil palm breeding programmes. Increase in the number of trained staff, availability of appropriate genomics tools and infrastructure in many commercial plantation companies have provided the incentive to implement MAS. The most basic application of markers in oil palm breeding is probably testing … Read more

Efficient harvesting of fresh fruit bunches (FFB) is vital to ensure the FFB are harvested within the recommended harvesting round of 10 to 12 days interval. Manual harvesting (using a sickle or chisel) can only produce about an average of 1 t FFB man-1 day-1 (Azman et al., 2015). Estates are now looking for more … Read more

MPOB has introduced an oil palm motorised cutter known as ‘Cantas Evo’ that works effectively for palms with harvesting height of less than 7 m. Cantas which is powered by a small petrol engine has been proven to increase harvesting output compared to manual harvesting. Over the past two years, a new generation motorised cutter … Read more

Fusarium spp. cause diseases in a wide range of host plants. At least 81 of 101 economically important crop plants diseases are caused by Fusarium. Several Fusarium pathogens cause essentially similar symptoms on different crops such as cortical decay of roots, root rot, wilting, yellowing, rosette and premature death on infected plants (Beckman and Roberts, … Read more

Coconut cadang-cadang viroid (CCCVd) is the smallest pathogen with a size range of 246-401 nt. The viroid is encapsulated, circular and single strand RNA (ribonucleic acid) depending on the host protein for replication (Flores et al., 2005). The lethal coconut cadang-cadang disease caused by CCCVd in Philippines infects the coconut palms and caused a total … Read more