THERE are journeys where the destination is not what stays with you. It is what you notice along the way.
Years ago, I often travelled to visit my company’s plantation in Sugut, Sabah.
On the return journey towards Telupid, the road passed one smallholding after another. Some plots were neat and well-tended, their palms almost standing to attention.
Others looked as though palms and owners were negotiating daily with weeds, uncertain weather and limited means.
What often caught my eye were fertiliser bags stacked by the roadside, tucked beneath zinc-roofed sheds or resting against an oil palm.
I wondered about their story. Had they just been delivered? Was the farmer waiting for labour? Had rain interrupted the work? Or had cash flow allowed the fertiliser to be bought, but not yet applied?
Whatever the reason, the image stayed with me.
A fertiliser bag may contain everything a palm needs, yet it will never produce a single additional bunch on its own.
Someone must first afford it, choose the right formulation,carry it into the field, apply it correctly and wait for biology to reward good stewardship.
It struck me that the greatest challenge was never the fertiliser itself. It was everything that had to happen before the bag was opened.
The longer I reflected on that roadside image, the more I realised the bag was never the real story. The smallholder was.
For years, I regarded the yield gap largely as an agronomic puzzle.
Like many in the industry, I looked towards better planting materials, balanced nutrition, timely harvesting and stronger field management.
If yields disappointed, surely better agronomy was the answer.
The more smallholders I met, however, the more that conviction changed.
Their conversations rarely began with potassium rates or harvesting intervals. They began with life.
One worried about school fees. Another wondered whether his son would return to the farm or remain in town driving an e-hailing car.
One spoke of rising fertiliser prices; another of finding harvesters before overripe bunches shed valuable loose fruits.
As kopi-O cooled beneath modest verandas, the real stories emerged: resilience rather than complaint, quiet ambition rather than grand dreams, and difficult choices made with almost no margin for error.
Smallholders seldom make isolated farming decisions. Every fertiliser application competes with household expenses. Every decision to replant competes with several years of reduced income. Every investment carries the weight of family responsibility.
Agronomy is easy to prescribe from an office. It becomes far harder when every ringgit or rupiah already has several claimants. The oil palm itself began to look different to me.
For many smallholders, it was no longer merely a crop, but a companion through uncertainty: a bank account rooted in soil, a source of school fees, a retirement fund, a gamble against weather and markets and, sometimes, a green promise that next year might be better.
Those roadside conversations stayed with me long after the journeys ended.
They eventually sent me back, not to another plantation, but to the research.
I wanted to know whether what I had heard over countless cups of kopi had also been observed in careful studies.
It had. The research explained what was happening. The conversations helped explain why.
Together, they revealed a picture that neither could have painted alone.
A deeper truth emerged: the real yield gap is not simply the difference between what a palm can produce and what it actually produces.
It is often the gap between knowing what should be done and having enough confidence to do it.
That confidence is not created by encouragement alone.
It is built through trusted advice, protection from exploitation, affordable inputs, sensible financing, dependable labour, fair markets and institutions that reduce uncertainty rather than deepen it.
The crop is there, but the yield is missing
One major study of Indonesian independent smallholders examined nearly a thousand fields and reached a sobering conclusion.
On average, farmers harvested only about 42% of what their palms could realistically produce under comparable conditions. More than half the attainable crop was missing. At first glance, the remedy appears obvious. Apply more fertiliser. Harvest more regularly. Control weeds. Prune correctly. But every recommendation carries a cost.
The studies found that many smallholders could not apply enough fertiliser.
Others used what they could afford rather than what the palms most needed. Potassium and magnesium, both important to palm growth and bunch formation, were frequently inadequate.
It is easy to say, “Apply more fertiliser.”
It is harder to ask who pays, who advises, who carries the risk and who absorbs the loss if the recommendation proves unsuitable. A plantation company spreads risk across thousands of hectares. A smallholder farming two or three hectares cannot.
One poor purchase, one weak-price season or one medical bill can consume years of savings.
When that happens, caution is not laziness. It is survival. The limiting nutrient may be potassium. The limiting factor is often confidence.
Harvesting tells a similar story. Oil palm rewards rhythm. Harvest regularly and the crop responds. Delay too long and loose fruits are lost, bunches become overripe and quality declines.
Yet regular rounds require workers, transport and buyers willing to collect fruit on time. When any link breaks, biology does not wait.
Perhaps the most sobering finding was that many of the widest yield gaps occurred when palms should have been at their biological peak.
Those should have been the years when families accumulated savings, invested in education and prepared for replanting.
Instead, many palms spent their prime underfed or poorly managed. Lost youth, in palms as in people, is never recovered.
For years, the industry has looked towards replanting as the principal solution. Better genetics undoubtedly matter. Certified planting materials raise the crop’s potential.
But better seedlings cannot compensate for chronic underfeeding, irregular harvesting or weak field management. High-performing genetics planted into weak systems become talented palms trapped by their circumstances.
The encouraging news is that the research also points towards hope. When ordinary good farming was applied consistently – balanced fertiliser, regular harvesting, sensible pruning, proper frond placement and better weed management – yields rose by about 40%.
There was no miracle technology, expensive machinery or expansion into new land. Just ordinary agronomy, practised consistently.
That may be the most encouraging lesson of all. The science is largely known. The challenge is helping farmers sustain good practice long enough for nature to respond.
Costs rise first; benefits come later. Oil palm has a long biological memory.
A farmer may know what should be done and still hesitate because the household must survive before the crop repays the investment.
A loan can be approved on paper and still fail in the field. Finance, too, must respect biology. Oil palm does not answer to a twelve-month banking calendar.
When organisation changes behaviour
Across the Straits of Malacca, another smallholder story emerges. The palms look familiar. The support systems do not.
Malaysia’s independent smallholders face many of the same pressures: ageing palms, rising input costs, labour shortages, uncertain succession and increasingly demanding sustainability requirements.
Many still rely on contractors. Records may be incomplete. Fertiliser may be applied by habit rather than analysis.
Yet the Johor experience under the P&G Smallholder Programme shows what becomes possible when farmers are supported not only with technical advice but also with organisation, certification, traceability and structured access to inputs and markets.
Participating farmers reported yield gains of about 20% to 25% over two to three years, with some longer-participating farms reaching 35%.
The figures matter. But the deeper transformation was behavioural.
Farmers who once estimated began to measure. Those who relied on memory began keeping records.
Fertiliser moved from guesswork to planning. Harvests became something analysed rather than remembered. Audits became less a visit by strangers and more a checkpoint for better management.
Perhaps most importantly, farmers stopped learning alone.
Through organisations such as Pertaniaga, they became members, mentors and ambassadors. Experienced growers shared practical knowledge.
Learning farms allowed neighbours to see improvements with their own eyes.
Women assumed leadership roles. Experience began to circulate rather than remain isolated.
There is quiet dignity in that transformation. The smallholder is no longer merely the smallest supplier at the end of a long value chain. He – and increasingly she – becomes a recognised participant with records, identity, responsibilities and a voice.
Traceability is often discussed as though it exists only to satisfy distant regulators or overseas buyers. But it can also serve the farmer. A smallholder whose land is mapped, production recorded and practices known becomes easier to advise, finance, reward and include.
Anonymity may shield a farmer from scrutiny. It can also exclude that farmer from opportunity.
None of this means Malaysia has solved the smallholder question, nor that one successful programme can simply be transplanted elsewhere.
Indonesia’s sector is larger and more diverse. Malaysia itself differs greatly between Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, and between organised and independent growers.
The comparison must therefore be made with humility.
Yet one lesson travels well. Risk must be shared if improvement is to endure.
Beyond technology: The confidence gap
The real comparison is between two ways of thinking about development.
One focuses primarily on technology. The other asks what enables people to use technology consistently.
Better planting materials matter. Balanced fertiliser matters. Mechanisation matters. Digital agriculture, drones and artificial intelligence will all play useful roles.
But technology alone cannot persuade a hesitant farmer to invest scarce savings.
Confidence can. And confidence is built by institutions. Governance is often misunderstood as little more than regulations, meetings and paperwork.
That is not the governance I mean.
In the field, governance has a simpler and more human meaning.
It is everything that allows an ordinary farmer to make an extraordinary decision with confidence.
It is trusted extension advice, affordable inputs secured through cooperation, financing that respects crop biology, prompt and transparent mill payments, protection from exploitation, secure land tenure and the confidence that comes from belonging to a community rather than standing alone.
Together, they determine whether bunches are produced consistently.Governance does not replace biology. It enables biology.
Too often, smallholders are treated either as technical problems to be corrected or as voters to be appeased, rather than as economic partners to be equipped and strengthened.
We distribute manuals without fixing access to suitable inputs, preach sustainability without addressing cash flow, promote replanting without bridging the years of reduced income, and set yield targets without ensuring labour, transport or reliable markets.
Then we wonder why adoption is slow. Perhaps the problem is not that farmers refuse to fish. Perhaps we keep giving them instructions while leaving them without a boat.
A farmer cannot absorb technology if the institutional soil around him is saturated with uncertainty. When governance is weak, fertiliser remains a risky expense, training a passing event, certification paperwork and replanting postponement.
When governance is strong, fertiliser becomes investment, data a management tool, certification market access, organisation bargaining power and confidence productivity.
Stewardship: Creating the conditions to flourish
The deeper leadership question is not whether smallholders can improve. The evidence suggests they can.
The question is whether our institutions make good decisions affordable, visible and worth sustaining.
Leadership is not simply about making decisions for people. It is about creating conditions in which people feel secure enough to make good decisions themselves. That, to me, is stewardship: not doing everything for farmers, but building systems that allow them to flourish through their own effort.
I still think about those fertiliser bags beside the road between Sugut and Telupid. Years ago, I saw only bags waiting to be opened. Today, I see families weighing today’s sacrifice against tomorrow’s harvest.
Perhaps the real yield gap has never been only about what the palm can produce. Perhaps it has always been about whether we build systems that give ordinary farmers the confidence to unlock what the palm already knows how to give.
Joseph Tek Choon Yee has over 30 years of experience in the plantation industry, with a strong background in oil palm research and development, C-suite leadership and industry advocacy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
