RESEARCH ARTICLE

Journal of Oil Palm Research Vol. 15 No. 1, June 2003, p. 41-54

PRELIMINARY FIELD AND COST EVALUATIONS OF A PROTOTYPE OIL PALM SEEDLING TRANSPLANTER

EL PEBRIAN, Darius* ; AZMI Yahya*

ABSTRACT

Mechanized field transplanting of oil palm seedling with the trailed type transplanter resulted with a planting capacity of 99 seedlings/man-day or 0.62 ha man-day-1 as compared to 0.28 ha man-day-1 or 45 seedling man day-1with the manual transplanting planting system; an improvement of 2.2 times. The quality of planting with the mechanized transplanting system indicated insignificant variations in leaning angles, spacing, row alignment, pulling forces and height increment among planted seedlings. Almost 99.45% of the total seedlings planted by the transplanter were categorized under upright palms. The average spacing between adjacent planted seedlings was 8.56 m and exceeded only by 0.06 ± 0.02 m from the proposed distance, whereas row alignment of planted seedlings variations was 1.78 ± 0.33 cm along planting lines in each row. The soil around the planted seedling was almost uniformly compacted with an averaged pulling force of 347.39 ± 20.27 N per planted seedling. The entire seedlings were successfully planted in the field by the transplanter with averaged palms height increment of 18.6+2.45 cm after the first month of planting and 22.5+3.34 cm after the second month of planting. The estimated planting cost is RM 2.11 per seedling with mechanized transplanting as compared to RM 2.26 with manual transplanting; a reduction of 6.64%.

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* Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering,
Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM
Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia.
E-mail: de-pebrian@hotmail.com