Abstract
The labour shortage and rising of fertiliser prices that is being faced by the oil palm plantation industries in Malaysia becomes challenging problems in their operations to achieve sustainability of economic and productivity. Thus, mechanisation has been adopted as an alternative approach to replace labour and at the same time to save costs in fertiliser application. This study was conducted to compare field performances of silo and non-silo systems in mechanising fertiliser application in Malaysian oil palm plantation industry. The silo system uses a temporary silo for storage the fertiliser in the field, while the non-silo system applies directly the fertiliser from the storage house. The results showed that the silo system gave a field capacity of 3.77 ha h–1 or 1.5 times greater than that of 2.49 ha h–1 of the non-silo. The total cost of silo was USD 3.31 ha–1 or 5.74% higher as compared to USD 3.12 ha–1 of the non-silo. The findings are only applicable for flat and undulating areas. Nonetheless, both systems can be considered as low-cost systems as compared to the manual system, which requires a total costs ranging from USD 3.66 ha–1 to USD 4.28 ha–1 for fertilising operation. The silo system is recommended for those plantations which need a timeliness of fertiliser application in the field.
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