Access to accurate predictions or budgets of future production is extremely important for oil palm plantation companies. Short-term forecasts based on black bunch counts help companies to plan sales and arrange CPO transport and mill maintenance. Yearly crop budgets form an important component of the overall financial budget and help companies to plan labor allocation and timing of fertilizer application or other field work. However, beyond this also longer term crop budgets are highly important, for example to plan replanting dates, strategic sales contracts or construction of new palm oil mills.
While the first two aspects have been covered in the OMP-AMIS suite for a while with the OMP Crop Forecast and OMP Crop Budget add-ins, Agrisoft Systems now also offers a tool for the longterm budgets with the recent release of the OMP Ten Year Crop Budget (OMP-TYCB). OMP-TYCB was developed in close cooperation with our customers and has particular strengths in taking replanting plans into account.
The way in which OMP-TYCB generates crop budgets can be split into two distinct steps. In the first step, the program evaluates the predicted plantation age spread, i.e. the number of hectares per tree age and division, for each of the next ten years. In the second step, it uses user-defined yield profiles to estimate the yearly production and yield. The calculations in the first step are based on the “current” plantation age spread, i.e. the age spread in the year the budget is being generated. The program offers great flexibility both in setting up the initial plantation age profile and in entering and maintaining yield profiles and replanting plans. For further details please refer to the full length article in the 14th edition of the Agrisoft Systems Newsletter from June 2015.

First published June 2015