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| Sago Palm Indonesia in Sungai Tohor Village |
In Malaysia,
sago palms are mostly cultivated in a semi-wild state by smallholders with
varying plant densities. This is still the mainstream cultivation practice by
most smallholders today. The total sago-growing area is difficult to estimate
but is roughly 30,000–40,000 ha, with less than 20,000 ha in sustainable
production. Owing mainly to non-intensive cultivation, the average starch yield
is low, about 2 mt/ha/ year as estimated from the export figures. The first
large-scale sago plantion (7700 ha) in Malaysia was initiated in the mid-1980s
at Mukah. Palms were planted
rather semi-intensively
on raw deep peat. The plantation was expanded to over 21,000 ha (Hassan 2002) at two
nearby locations in the following two decades or so.
Despite great
effort to improve sago palm cultivation in the mid-2000s, the growth of most
palms is suboptimal, and starch yield is generally low. In Indonesia, sago
palms are mainly cultivated in a semi-wild manner in smallholdings,
similar to
the practices in Malaysia. The planting density also varies greatly but on
average is about 30 palms/ha (Jong 2000a). Yields
also vary with some good gardens achieving about 10 mt/ha/y in some intensive
sago farms
(Yamamoto et
al. 2008). At Selat
Panjang, a 12,000 ha sago plantation, employing
improved agronomic and management practices, somewhat similar to oil palm
cultivations, was initiated in 1996 on rather mature deep peat (Jong 2000b). In this
plantation, sago palms were cultivated in 50-ha blocks surrounded by canals.
The canals are used to
transport farm inputs and harvested sago logs and for fire prevention/fighting,
as well as for water table control. To facilitate management and reduce travel
time, a base camp was built for every 1000 ha and a 10-man worker’s quarter
constructed for each 200 ha within the plantation. Excavated material from digging
the canals was compacted to form roads for light vehicles and motorcycles to
expedite supervisory work. Started in 1996, some palms reached maturity
(flowering) in 9–10 years, but most palms matured in about 11 years in this
plantation. It is still in production although not all the palms are in optimal
growth conditions.
