Intercropping with Oil Palm

In the beginning, we explored a few crops suitable to be intercropped with oil palm. Namely bananas, pineapples, tapioca, sweet potatoes, taro and others.

Our journey started at the wet markets to partner up with a buyer to purchase our produce

prior to planting. We decided to go with tapioca or ubi kayu as we are able to gather the most complete information on its whole value chain.

We met with a buyer - let's call him Uncle Ah Lam. He caters into a market so specific 'Bingka Ubi' (Photo) for primary and secondary schools that he is able to precisely predict his daily consumption for this particular type of tapioca. "Red Tapioca" (Photo). Very quickly, we were able to lock into our farm gate selling price and daily quantity. We were given a crash course on the method of planting when we visited Uncle Ah Lam's farm to collect tapioca canes to be planted at our farm.

After doing the math on how much area we need to plant "Red Tapioca", there are still huge swaths of land vacant. So after making a few enquiries, we found out that the chips/crisps/ kerepek market's demand for tapioca is quite huge. There are more than a few producers in Banting area. In fact, their products are famous throughout Malaysia. 2 of the more famous kerepek factories are Fazz & Ros Kerepek.

There are 2 types of tapioca that is acceptable for them to produce their kerepek. White and Yellow Most farmers prefer to plant the white variety because of its higher yield.

However, the factories prefer the yellow variety because of its natural yellow colour that makes the kerepek looks golden after it is fried. It is more appealing to the consumers. For the white variety, the factories need to add natural colouring to give it that golden look. This extra step is added costs to the factories.

We weren't provided with a guaranteed buy back contract from most kerepek factories as we were new comers to the market and the quality of our produce had to go through a quality check prior to acceptance and subsequently price discussions. Apparently, the way the tapioca is being planted, soil and weather conditions will affect the quality of the end products & hence will affect the selling price or maybe not be accepted at all.

The rest of the area that wasn't planted with red tapioca were being planted with yellow tapioca. It was quite a daunting proposition for us as we could not foresee the outcome of this venture being inexperienced as we are. Nevertheless, with limited information that we have, we took the path to plant yellow tapioca as it was more in demand from the point of view of the factories.

As I am not able to show how we planted the tapioca from beginning till harvest. I have decided to do a video Starting from Week 1 (Follow our youtube channel look for Starting from Week 1 series. There are other crops that we planted there starting from week 1).