Update (June 2, 2024): PySawit has been replaced by Sawit.jl, which is much improved and faster, and has been validated against more sites.

Oil Palm Growth and Yield Model

by Christopher Teh Boon Sung

PySawit is a model, written in Python language, to simulate the growth and yield of oil palm. The following are various conditions among which PySawit is able to simulate:

• different planting densities
• different weather conditions (such as air temperature, rainfall, etc.)
• different soil properties (such as soil texture)
• different crop physiological conditions (such as flower sex ratios, specific leaf area, plant nutrient content, photosynthetic parameters, etc.)

At the moment, PySawit simulates crop production level 2, where oil palm is limited only by meteorological and soil water availability. Nutrients, pests, diseases, weeds, and other field practices are assumed to be optimally managed.

Read the brief report on PySawit.

1. To simplify the installation process, download the Anaconda suite. Make sure you only choose the Python version 3.5 or higher (NOT ver 2.7). Downloading the Anaconda suite will include not only the Python interpreter but also the matplotlib, numpy, and xlwings modules which are required by PySawit.

2. Then, at your system's command line or prompt, type: pip install pysawit to download and install the PySawit.

3. If you want the Excel user-interface to PySawit and the example files, just download the files from the examples folder. Or download the entire PySawit repository.

4. You may also want to download and install Graphviz if you are planning to use PySawit's tracing feature to plot out a map of the program flow. Ensure you read the Graphviz website on how to set up the environment variable to recognize the location of graphviz files.

Call Python on pysawit.py. See this file's documentation on the commandline flags or options.

Preliminary work of PySawit was progressively published in several conference proceedings, but the full or complete work of PySawit was first published in:

Teh, C. B. S., & Cheah, S. S. (2018). Modelling crop growth and yield in palm oil cultivation. In A. Rival (Ed.), Achieving sustainable cultivation of oil palm (Vol. 1, pp. 183-227). Cambridge, UK: Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing.