TESTIMONIALS

Pong Hua Qiang is the owner of a small orchard, who applies high-quality fertilisers appropriately to enhance the growth quality of his palm trees and produce high yield of the palm fruit bunches. With the trees growing at optimum health, they have higher resistance to pests and diseases, making them fit for purpose. The orchard also has minimum pest control issues.

Correct formula applied according to the tree condition

Pong currently owns several palm plantations with a total of 40 acres. One of them is a 10-acre plantation located at Bahau, Seremban that is planted with 600 palm trees aged between 4 to 6 years. As a result of appropriate fertiliser management practice, each tree produces abundant fruit bunches at an average of 16 to 17 tonnes.

Under the guidance of an expert, he applies different fertilisers at the various phases of tree condition. He chooses to use the imported high-quality European fertiliser series as distributed by AgroBridge (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd. He pointed out that oil palm requires fertilising every 3 months and he sequentially applies Uneka-B12-11-18-3MgO + TE formula that is high in boron and magnesium to enhance the fruiting and flowering processes, as well as 5-9-32-2+7S+9CaO+TE high-potassium formula for higher fruit yield. Furthermore, after the transplant of the young plants, he would apply 15-15-6-4+TE to enhance the root growth. This would allow the palm trees to reach the optimum size to withstand the weight of the fruit bunches and eventually, this would lead to high crop yield.

He explained that he would repeat the fertilisation process above after the harvesting the period, keeping the fertiliser quantity at 2kg per tree. Besides, he would also apply the AgroBridge concentrated trace elements twice a year at 200g each. At the same time, he would additionally apply organic fertilisers 2 to 3 times a year in order to maintain optimum soil condition for optimum nutrition absorption by the trees.

Free from basal stem rot

Since applying the above fertilisation method, Pong observed that the trees have since grown healthily and produced high crop yield. Following this, he concurred that healthy palm trees are highly resistant to pests and diseases and by not using chicken manure fertiliser, the palm trees are free from basal stem rot symptoms.

As for pests, he said that the young plants are usually attacked by the Rhinoceros beetles. However, this issue does not persist as the plants mature. The orchard does not have bagworm issue too. Although this orchard faces minimal issues of pests or diseases, this is attributed to his appropriate fertiliser management practice, scheduled herbicide application and weeds clearing to properly upkeep the orchard.

Aw Da Ming, the technical business executive of AgroBridge and the regional product distributor, Xiao Li Qiang, visited Pong’s orchard last month to assess the results of the AgroBridge fertilisers and exchange information on fertilisation process. Pong said that it takes less than 3 years from the planting of seedling to the harvesting of fruits and currently, harvesting takes place once every 2 weeks. He expressed his satisfaction over the high crop production as a result of his appropriate fertilisation method.