oil palm tree

During my trip to my hometown recently all i saw on the way to my beloved village was oil palm trees (scientific name - Elaeis guineensis).

Oil palm is a crop that bears both male and female flowers on the same tree, meaning they are monoecious. Each tree produces compact bunches weighing between 10 and 25 kilograms with 1000 to 3000 fruitlets per bunch. Each fruitlet is almost spherical or elongated in shape. Generally the fruitlet is dark purple, almost black and the colour turns to orange red when ripe. Each fruitlet consists of of a hard kernel (seed) inside a shell (endocarp) which is surrounded by thea fleshy mesocarp.

A normal oil palm tree will start bearing fruits after 30 months of planting and will continue to be productive for the next 20 to 30 years thus ensuring a consistent supply of oil. Each ripe bunch is commonly known as Fresh Fruit Bunch (FFB).

In our country, the trees planted are mainly the tenera variety, a hybrid between the dura and pisifera. The tenera variety yields about 4 to 5 tonnes of crude palm oil (CPO) per hectare per year and about 1 tonne of palm kernels.

I wish all the best to those who started to plant the trees and hopefully they could get something out of it in 30 months time.