Smart Crop Improvement Platform
Oil palm is widely recognized as the most efficient oil-producing crop. Not only has it fed the world’s rapidly growing demand for food and raw materials, it has also provided the country with countless economic benefits. The demand for palm oil keeps increasing annually because it has become an essential that we cannot simply live without anymore. However, if the maximum palm oil yield remains at its current percentage, must environmental damages such as deforestation take place for more oil palm land cultivation? Oil palm is now meeting unprecedented challenges as it is extremely crucial to ensure sustainability effectively, now more than ever. In order to fulfil the stringent standards of sustainable palm oil, higher palm oil yield has to be produced with the limited land available. It is a well-known fact that the future of oil palm is heavily dependent on producing more with lesser resources to sustain the global market demands.
Improvements from the core, the breeding material.
Providentially, there is now a solution to address these issues. In order to produce more with less, a group of local breed young scientists from Codon Genomics has developed the first ever smart agriculture solution, AGRINOME™. This is a revolutionary platform as it is the first product in the industry to provide end-to-end solutions where the improvements start from the core of farming, which is the planting material, all the way to its commercial production through tissue culture and seed production. With the plague of haze drifting to Malaysia annually, fingers are constantly pointed at oil palm plantations as the root of the problem due to land being burned to be cleared for plantation. The issue of sustainability has dogged Malaysia for years as one of the largest oil palm producers in the world. Malaysia, being highly aware and concerned with this, seek to cap the country’s oil palm land to 6.5 million hectares by 2023 in order to work towards better solutions for sustainability. Therefore, elite planting materials that have better land use efficiency and better yield performance are demanding.
Applying Knowledge, Data and Technology for oil palm improvements.
AGRINOME™ is designed to modernize the oil palm industry by incorporating automation, digitisation and big data analytics into R&D and upstream industrial processes such as breeding and mass production of elite palms. The platform is designed to manage data through automated and digitized workflow, big data analytics to gain business intelligence and insights which ultimately leads to accurate decision making and increase production efficiency and traceability.
