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Dami Research - Technical Services
The Technical Services department was set up to assist NBPOL fast track certain projects (requiring a high degree of scientific input) from the development stage and into the working environment. The department has now grown to become a service provider in its own right and encompasses 4 disciplines
- Biotechnology
- Precision Agriculture
- Agronomy and
- Environment management
Biotechnology
This group works on both cell and tissue culture. A purpose built specialized laboratory was built in late 1996 to house the facility and work began in 1997. No genetic modification work is undertaken from this laboratory
The cell culture is primary research aimed at producing a homozygous palm for use in breeding studies.
Palm tissue culture has focused on the cloning of breeding palms in order to produce bi-clonal seed to assist in the seed production business. It has also been used as a means to secure particular genetic combinations. The technique is called Clonal Micropropagation and uses tissue extracted from the flowers of the donor palm as its starter material. The process takes about 2 years for the tissue to develop into tissue culture derived plants (termed ramets) which are then planted out in the nursery.
The aim of Tissue culture is to provide the breeding section with elite planting material.
Precision Agriculture
Precision Agriculture has 3 main tasks involving Plantation Mapping, Oil Palm Monitoring Program (OMP), and GeoDami.
Using GIS technologies, all holdings have been mapped with all data stored in GIS format and readily available for plantation management to review.
OMP is a data base management system capable of storing and analyzing input data, which describes the management units of each plantation. It has resulted in all of the company's 12 plantations and 7 mini estates, (comprising 29,000 hectares), being divided into 368 management units (MU's), each averaging 80 hectares. All agronomic data for each of these management units is recorded, stored and analyzed for plantation management purposes.
Following on from OMP, NBPOL has gone a step further in developing its own mapping and database management tool called GeoDami which is used to map the health status and track harvesting progress of all individual palms according to their known progeny.
All 3 key areas are aimed at providing plantation managers with the tools and information for improved and sustainable oil palm management and production.
Agronomy
The Agronomy program comprises 3 main areas namely, Management Unit (MU) characterization, organic recycling and pesticides.
As a requirement for the OMP database, plantations are divided into MU). Each MU is characterized for its agronomic data in terms of soils, climate, foliar nutrient status, and other relevant agronomic data. This information is fed into OMP and used for specific site management of such aspects as fertilizer application and management practices.
Organic recycling investigates the recycling or re use of by products. Much of the work has looked at the use of empty fruit bunches in composting, both as a superior potting mix in the Company's main nurseries and in the development of zero discharge technology for use in the company's mills. In the case of the nursery compost no topsoil is used. Nursery trails on the quality of seedlings grown in compost confirm the growth of palms is superior to those grown in topsoil.
With Pesticide management the focus is identifying effective means of controlling noxious weeds found within plantations. Various herbicides are tested in order to advise plantations on the most safest and effective methods of controlling weeds.
The overall objective is to provide planters with tools for site-specific management for sustainable oil palm production.
Environmental Management
The main thrust of this section has been the setting up and implementation of a robust Environmental Management system (EMS) through the use of the ISO 14001 system as a framework.
The section is concentrating on auditing the company to ensure compliance and mapping of fragile areas within the company holdings.
- Survey of all buffer zones along reserves, significant land sites and rivers
- Continuous internal audits of all operations
- Upgrade all hydrocarbon installations to comply with regulations
- Control and monitoring of all pollution control devices
All work done by the environment section is aimed at monitoring sustainable oil palm production |
