Learning from commercial crop performance: Oil palm yield response to management under well-defined growing conditions

Farmers learn from their own experiences. However, they are rarely sure if an exceptionally good or bad outcome is due to chance effects or whether it is due to a given combination of management practices and environmental conditions. We surmised that, if each harvest event is adequately characterized and a large number of these events are analyzed together, it should be possible to associate crop response to management within a particular set of growth conditions. We tested this hypothesis using the perennial crop, oil palm.