People, Palms, and Productivity: Testing Better Management Practices in Indonesian Smallholder Oil Palm Plantations^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Reviewer comments

 

Topic “People, palms, and productivity: Testing better management  practices in Indonesian smallholder oil palm plantations “ not really  proper, Rethink it i.e People component not coming out so should be dropped. Repetition of palms in topic

I see the Manuscript is covering:

Assessing the Effectiveness of Best Management Practices in Smallholder Oil Palm Plantations: A Case Study from Indonesia

 

Or

 

Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Oil Palm Plantations: Challenges and Opportunities for Best Management Practices in Indonesia"

 

The suggested  topics capture the essence of the abstract

 

Methodology: Clarify how the two study areas/sites are contrasting (differences in rainfall, soils, temperatures??)

 

You said it’s a paired plot but you talk of 3 plots ??? “Each two-hectare plantation was divided into three parts:

Focus on how productivity was measured (you spent more effort on soil sampling, nutrients etc ) which are not part of research questions. You either drop or add a research question related to those other parameters.

Results: They should answer research questions (1) What yields can be achieved in 99 mature smallholder oil palm plantations after implementing better practices; 2) How do 100 Agriculture 2024, 14, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 19 yields change over time in response to better practices; and 3) What are the costs, benefits 101 and risks of intensification?)

You spent too much time on other parametres not part of the qns e.g nutrients

 

3.5 A table is needed on cost benefit analysis by year before the one there just showing changes

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your constructive comments on our manuscript. Below, we provide a point-by-point response to your suggestions. 

1. With regards to the title: We agree that the 'people' component does not come back in e.g. the results, but it plays a very strong role in the way the practices were adopted, adapted and implemented. We also see the 'people' element as an essential component of the farming system. For this reason, we like our current title, which emphasizes that the people, palms and productivity interact. In addition, the titles that you propose may be more to the point, but we find the original one more catchy. So we would really prefer to keep it. 
2. With regards to the methodology, you remark: "Clarify how the two study areas/sites are contrasting (differences in rainfall, soils, temperatures??)" This information is available in Table 1 for soils, and in the supplementary materials for weather. To clarify, we added the following (L119-120): "see Table 1 for soil characteristics and Supplementary Material S1 for other details of the two sites."
3. You remark: "You said it’s a paired plot but you talk of 3 plots ??? “Each two-hectare plantation was divided into three parts:" Indeed, this is because we also allocated a small area to separate the two treatments from each other. This is clarified in the sentence after the one that you cite (L178-182): Each two-hectare plantation was divided into three parts: a BMP plot of about one ha (where better management practices were introduced); a REF plot of about one ha (the reference or control, where farmers were encouraged to continue with their management as usual); and two rows of palms between the plots to separate them, which were managed as the REF plots and were not sampled. In our view, this clarification is enough to explain that these are paired plots, even though the fields are divided into three separate parts.
4. Thank you for noting that our research questions do not cover some of the results. We realise that RQ2 does not cover the research intentions and activities very well, so we adapted it to read as follows (L98): 2) How do palm growth, tissue nutrient concentrations and yields change over time in response to better practices? 
5. You also suggest that we should "Focus on how productivity was measured". We describe this in five sentences, but it comes almost at the ends of the Methods section, right before the data analysis. Following your suggestion, we decided to change the structure of the section. Right after the site description, we put the paragraph that starts with "At the start of the project, all participating farmers were trained in better management practices, both in a classroom and in the field." (now L159-174.) We kept the next paragraph (Each two-hectare plantation was divided into three parts...) in place (now L178-185). Then, we put the paragraph about yield recording, which reads: Production was recorded at every harvest by a local project assistant. The harvesters were instructed by the farmers to separate the bunches from the BMP and the REF plots, and for each plot the number of bunches was counted, and the total weight was recorded. The bunch weight was calculated by dividing the total weight over the bunch number. Yield recording continued until September 2019. (Now L189-193.)
6. You mention the following point about the Results: "They should answer research questions (1) What yields can be achieved in mature smallholder oil palm plantations after implementing better practices; 2) How do yields change over time in response to better practices; and 3) What are the costs, benefits and risks of intensification?" And you note that "You spent too much time on other parametres not part of the questions, e.g nutrients". We agree with that point, and we have adapted RQ 2 as it was not well formulated at all. It now reads: 2) How do palm growth, tissue nutrient concentrations and yields change over time in response to better practices? (L98). This RQ covers the experimental setup and intentions of the research much better than the previous one. 
7. Finally, you mention that "A table is needed on cost benefit analysis by year before the one there just showing changes". However, we cannot provide a full overview of the costs and benefits as much of the data is missing, e.g. regarding labour costs. With the available data, we can show the changes in fertiliser costs and the corresponding changes in yield, and we can demonstrate that in many cases, the additional costs for fertilisers are not covered by the benefits from additional yield. This is the main purpose of the table. Clearly, a full cost-benefit analysis would be of interest, but that was not our primary focus.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

The topic chosen for your work is highly interesting and has the potential to be published in this journal. However, additional effort is needed to make it truly publishable and capable of capturing the attention of potential readers. Specifically, the analysis methodology needs to be revised and improved. Some theoretical and conceptual aspects are neglected or taken for granted. It is not enough to merely mention some analysis methodologies, theorems, or tests; the salient theoretical aspects referred to must also be described and defined within the manuscript.

It is important to ensure that the description and definition of the analysis methodology are detailed enough for a potential reader who is not an expert in these techniques to understand and replicate the work. The methodological section should be enriched with additional bibliographical references. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to add more bibliographical references to the introductory section as well.

In the introduction, the structure of the paper should be outlined. The conclusions appear brief and lack indications of the study’s limitations or potential future developments.

Below are more specific suggestions that I hope will be useful in improving your manuscript:

- Line 14-15: Consider moving this content to a footnote.

- Define acronyms the first time they are used (and at least once in each section of the manuscript). For example, clarify what FFB means in line 52.

- Review the editing of the manuscript to follow the journal's guidelines. For example, several empty lines (such as line 59) need to be removed.

- Enrich the introduction with a more extensive and exhaustive literature review. The current content is useful for describing smallholder oil palms but does not address whether other scholars have already explored these aspects. This addition would help highlight the added value of your manuscript compared to existing literature.

- The introduction should end with an indication of the paper's structure.

- Lines 142-143: Consider removing these from the table title and inserting them into the text or as a note to the table.

- Line 179: “plantation area; [24]).” I believe it should be “plantation area) [24].”

- Table 2 can be introduced earlier in the text.

- While the analysis methodology is clearly defined, it could be improved by dividing it into subparagraphs. First, include a description of the study area (details can be in the supplementary material), highlighting the spread of oil palm cultivation, the division into small and large growers, and the representativeness of the selected growers. Including a map here would be beneficial. Then, describe how the plots and samplings were made, followed by the econometric analysis of the collected data, with more meticulous descriptions of the techniques used. For example, for the treatment of outliers, explain the technique used to identify them (> 3 × InterQuartile Range). Enrich the methodological part with additional bibliographical references and explain why the costs of harvesting, weeding, and pruning were excluded.

- Use the thousands separator for numbers exceeding three digits.

- Simplify the title of Table 4. Move rows 404-409 to the text or as a note to the table.

- The conclusions, although exhaustive, appear very short. They lack indications of possible future developments and the study's limitations (beyond the not entirely satisfactory results).

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your constructive comments on our manuscript. Below, we provide a point-by-point response to your suggestions. 

Dear Authors,

The topic chosen for your work is highly interesting and has the potential to be published in this journal. However, additional effort is needed to make it truly publishable and capable of capturing the attention of potential readers. Specifically, the analysis methodology needs to be revised and improved. Some theoretical and conceptual aspects are neglected or taken for granted. It is not enough to merely mention some analysis methodologies, theorems, or tests; the salient theoretical aspects referred to must also be described and defined within the manuscript.

It is important to ensure that the description and definition of the analysis methodology are detailed enough for a potential reader who is not an expert in these techniques to understand and replicate the work. The methodological section should be enriched with additional bibliographical references. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to add more bibliographical references to the introductory section as well.

In the introduction, the structure of the paper should be outlined. The conclusions appear brief and lack indications of the study’s limitations or potential future developments.

Below are more specific suggestions that I hope will be useful in improving your manuscript:

• Line 14-15: Consider moving this content to a footnote. => The current position is according to the MDPI template, so we are not at liberty to change where this remark appears.
• Define acronyms the first time they are used (and at least once in each section of the manuscript). For example, clarify what FFB means in line 52. => Thank you for this observation. We replaced FFB with “fresh fruit bunches” in line 52 because we do not want to write brackets within brackets. We did not use the term elsewhere.
• Review the editing of the manuscript to follow the journal's guidelines. For example, several empty lines (such as line 59) need to be removed. => We have removed all the empty lines.
• Enrich the introduction with a more extensive and exhaustive literature review. The current content is useful for describing smallholder oil palms but does not address whether other scholars have already explored these aspects. This addition would help highlight the added value of your manuscript compared to existing literature. => Currently we cite 45 papers, of which 22 are cited in the introduction. These include at least nine papers that focus specifically on smallholder oil palm production. In the discussion, we cite an additional four papers which look at yield improvements following the application of better practices in large-scale plantations and in smallholder fields in Ghana. On the basis of your suggestion, we now mention these four papers in the introduction already, by adding to L94 the section “(but see [23-26])”, so that the whole sentence now reads: "Knowledge on the yield effects and the costs and benefits of better practices in smallholder oil palm plantations is limited (but see [23-26])." 
• The introduction should end with an indication of the paper's structure. => At the end of the introduction, we added the following lines (L103-106): “Section 2 provides a description of the study area and an overview of the experimental setup, measurements, and data analysis. In Section 3 we present our results. In Section 4 we critically discuss our results and place them in a broader perspective. In Section 5 we present our conclusions, recommendations, and proposed ways forward.”
• Lines 142-143: Consider removing these from the table title and inserting them into the text or as a note to the table. => We moved the text into a footnote.
• Line 179: “plantation area; [24]).” I believe it should be “plantation area) [24].” => Changed.
• Table 2 can be introduced earlier in the text. => We agree, and we changed the order of the Methods section. Right after the site description, we put the paragraph that starts with "At the start of the project, all participating farmers were trained in better management practices, both in a classroom and in the field." (L159-161.) This paragraph refers to Table 2, which is therefore introduced early in the Methods section.
• While the analysis methodology is clearly defined, it could be improved by dividing it into subparagraphs. => Thank you for that suggestion. We re-introduced the sub-headings.
• First, include a description of the study area (details can be in the supplementary material), highlighting the spread of oil palm cultivation, the division into small and large growers, and the representativeness of the selected growers. => We discuss the representativeness of the growers in the main text (Section 2.2) and in the Supplementary Material 1. Data on the spread of oil palm cultivation and the division into small and large growers are not readily available and would require additional research, which we consider beyond the scope of the current manuscript.
• Including a map here would be beneficial. => We added a map to the Supplementary Materials (Figure S1), indicating the approximate location of the two villages .
• Then, describe how the plots and samplings were made, followed by the econometric analysis of the collected data, with more meticulous descriptions of the techniques used. […] Explain why the costs of harvesting, weeding, and pruning were excluded => The section on the econometric analysis was adapted. It now reads (L289-299): “Farmers were asked to record data on costs of labour and inputs, but the records were repeatedly found to be incomplete, except for fertiliser costs. For this reason only fertiliser costs were included to calculate the annual change in costs (BMP – REF; 10⁶ Rp ha^–1 year^–1) in the cost-benefit analysis. Fertiliser costs included the actual or reported purchase costs for all fertilisers that were applied (including empty fruit bunches). Prices per bag or ton were multiplied with the number of bags or tons ha^–1 year^–1, and summed to give the total fertiliser cost ha^–1 year^–1. Benefits were calculated by substracting annual yields in the REF plots from annual yields in the BMP plots (kg ha^–1 year^–1) and then multiplying with an average bunch price of 1200 Rp kg^–1. Outcomes were converted to USD using an exchange rate of 15,000 Rp USD^–1. In 2018 and 2019 we assumed that the costs were equal to the mean costs over the previous years as we did not have data on fertiliser applications during these years.”
• For example, for the treatment of outliers, explain the technique used to identify them (> 3 × InterQuartile Range) => There were no outliers in the economic analysis, nor in any of the other variables apart from bunch weight.
• Enrich the methodological part with additional bibliographical references => We are not sure which additional references are required to clarify our methodology.
• Use the thousands separator for numbers exceeding three digits. => Thank you for this suggestion. We will make sure that we follow the MDPI layout style guide, which says: Where there are five or more digits to the left of the decimal point, use a comma to separate every three digits, e.g., 123,456 or 153,958.9476. We have checked the manuscript and corrected it accordingly.
• Simplify the title of Table 4. Move rows 404-409 to the text or as a note to the table. => The caption now reads: “Table 4: Costs and benefits of fertiliser application in the BMP plots.” All other information was moved to footnotes.
• The conclusions, although exhaustive, appear very short. They lack indications of possible future developments and the study's limitations (beyond the not entirely satisfactory results). => We discuss the study’s limitations throughout the discussion section, which is why we did not repeat the information in the conclusions. The second half of the conclusions discusses the important future research areas and activities. With regards to future developments, we have added the following (L591-595): Initiatives like mandatory certification (ISPO), voluntary certification (e.g. RSPO) and mandatory international standards (e.g. EUDR) put more and more pressure on farmers to adhere to good practices and monitor inputs and outputs. Digital tools (e.g. remote sensing, apps) can help with these efforts, but on-farm experimentation and data collection remain a key priority."

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper examines the impact of "best management practices" within a sample of smallholder plantations. The subject matter is aimed at enhancing yields and profitability, which holds substantial significance. Overall, the paper is clear and has a reasonable structure, with practical implications in its conclusions. Nonetheless, there are several areas where the article could benefit from refinement:

1.       The abstract needs revision. Typically, the abstract should provide information about the research background, research idea, conclusion. But the research idea and the conclusions are mixed. Therefore, the research idea and conclusions should be separate and clearly stated.

2.       The management practices should be more precisely defined. What specific measures are involved, and how do these measures potentially influence key indicators such as output?

3.       In the concluding section, provide concrete and feasible recommendations centered around the research findings.

4.       Digital transformation is becoming a trend, and this is particularly pronounced in agriculture. Measures related to digital transformation are bound to significantly affect key indicators like yield. Therefore, I suggest the inclusion of a forward-looking perspective. During the writing process, the author might consider referring to the following literature:

Li Z., Chen H. & Mo B. (2022) Can digital finance promote urban innovation? Evidence from China, Borsa Istanbul Review, doi: 10.1016/j.bir.2022. 10.006.

Li C., Long G. & Li S. (2023) Research on measurement and disequilibrium of manufacturing digital transformation: Based on the text mining data of A-share listed companies, Data Science in Finance and Economics, doi: 10.3934/DSFE.2023003.

Liu G., Yi H. & Liang H. (2023) Measuring provincial digital finance development efficiency based on stochastic frontier model, Quantitative Finance and Economics, doi: 10.3934/QFE.2023021.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required.!

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your constructive comments on our manuscript. Below, we provide a point-by-point response to your suggestions. 

This paper examines the impact of "best management practices" within a sample of smallholder plantations. The subject matter is aimed at enhancing yields and profitability, which holds substantial significance. Overall, the paper is clear and has a reasonable structure, with practical implications in its conclusions. => Thank you for this positive reflection on the paper.

Nonetheless, there are several areas where the article could benefit from refinement:

1. The abstract needs revision. Typically, the abstract should provide information about the research background, research idea, conclusion. But the research idea and the conclusions are mixed. Therefore, the research idea and conclusions should be separate and clearly stated. => We are not entirely sure which section of the abstract you find confusing. In order to analyse the structure of the abstract, we divided it into Background (More than 40% … yields and profitability); Methods (We implemented improved … additional two years); Results (In the treatment … the critical value); Discussion (Because of the … beyond the experiment) and Conclusions (It is challenging … oil palm plantations). In our view, the structure is logical, but perhaps it is not for the readers. So can you please clarify which part you find mixed?
2. The management practices should be more precisely defined. What specific measures are involved, and how do these measures potentially influence key indicators such as output? => Thank you for this suggestion. A detailed description of Good Agricultural Practices in oil palm is available in the (grey) literature. To guide the readers, we added three references and we indicate these in the following line (L161): “Practices are described in detail in [27-29].” These references refer to 

   27. Rankine, I. R. and T. H. Fairhurst. Field handbook: Oil palm series, volume 3 – mature. second. Singapore: Potash & Phosphate Institute (PPI), 1999
   28. Woittiez, L. S., S. Haryono, S. Turhina, H. Dani, T. P. Dukan and H. H. Smit. Smallholder oil palm handbook module 2: Harvesting, grading, transport. Third. Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen University and SNV International Development Organisation, 2016, 25 pages.
   29. Woittiez, L. S., S. Haryono, S. Turhina, H. Dani, T. P. Dukan and H. H. Smit. Smallholder oil palm handbook module 3: Plantation maintenance. Third. Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen University and SNV International Development Organisation, 2016, 53 pages.

3. In the concluding section, provide concrete and feasible recommendations centered around the research findings. => Although we don’t give direct recommendations, we use the conclusion to highlight practices that farmers readily adopted (e.g. circle weeding) and we discuss why these practices may be attractive. In addition, we provide recommendations on the type of research and the type of research questions that we consider most urgent and relevant. To improve the recommendations, we added (L588-589): “… especially in plantations where yields are already substantial.” We do not provide more concrete recommendations because we investigated the better management practices as a package, and therefore we cannot provide direct recommendations about specific practices on the basis of the data that we have available. But please see our reply to your next comment for more additions to the Conclusions.
4. Digital transformation is becoming a trend, and this is particularly pronounced in agriculture. Measures related to digital transformation are bound to significantly affect key indicators like yield. Therefore, I suggest the inclusion of a forward-looking perspective. During the writing process, the author might consider referring to the following literature: => Thank you for this suggestion. To our surprise, oil palm smallholders in Indonesia make very little use of digital tools. They use their phone for WhatsApp and Instagram, but not for e.g. recording of data or for looking up yield advice. We have added the following forward-looking lines: “Initiatives like mandatory certification (ISPO), voluntary certification (e.g. RSPO) and mandatory international standards (e.g. EUDR) put more and more pressure on farmers to adhere to good practices and monitor inputs and outputs. Digital tools (e.g. remote sensing, apps) can help with these efforts, but on-farm experimentation and data collection remain a key priority.”