The first one: Abdul Ghani posing with the first Genome Select palm at the Dusun Durian palm oil plantation in Carey Island

27/04/2016 (The Star) - Sime Darby Bhd expects a 15% increase in yield from its existing oil palm plantations following a breakthrough in research and development (R&D).

The group, which kicked off the first commercial planting of its new high-yielding oil palm genome yesterday, said the move would bring “significant increases” to its bottomline by financial year 2021.

The “Genome Select”, a result of seven years of R&D by the company, has the potential to produce yields of over 11 tonnes per hectare under the best environmental conditions, without needing any additional land.

This will result in average yields of above 6.1 tonnes per hectare across all environments in the group’s plantations, it said.

This compares to the average of 5.3 tonnes per hectare yields from the current top planting material, called Calix 600.

Sime Darby group chief executive Tan Sri Mohd Bakke Salleh said the material would only be used in its Malaysian plantations, due to restrictions in other countries.

“The Genome Select planting material will give us additional oil on a per hectare basis.

“We usually get anything between eight and 10 tonnes of oil per hectare, but with this, we can get 15% more – about 11.5 or 11.6 tonnes,” he said during a press conference here.

The group’s plantation arm, Sime Darby Plantation, conducts replanting on 5% of the company’s total planted area of 316,000 hectares each year.

“By 2023, we would have enough planting material to do our annual replanting entirely using Genome Select.

“At that point, the impact to the bottomline will be significant,” he said.

Earlier, Sime Darby group chairman Tan Sri Abdul Ghani Othman planted the first Genome Select tree at the Dusun Durian palm oil plantation here.

For this year, the group will plant 50 hectares of the material at this estate and another 50 hectares at the Diamond Jubilee estate in Malacca in September.