In Seruyan, a regency in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province, independent smallholders are trialing regenerative agriculture strategies in their oil palm farms in an effort to shift away from environmentally degrading monoculture practices and restore ecosystems.

The intervention, run by non-profit research organization Kaleka (formerly Yayasan Inobu), has come out of a wider jurisdictional approach pilot that is aiming to bring all palm oil producers in the district, with over 320,000 hectares of plantations, into compliance with the international Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification scheme.

One of the key targets of Seruyan’s Jurisdictional Approach is to encourage the certification and sale of Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) by the district’s smallholders, which include both Indigenous Dayak people and transmigrant settlers from different provinces. However, as Kaleka’s deep village-level work is finding, there are complex challenges that need to be overcome if all independent smallholders are to be convinced to participate in this process.

These issues include demands on oil palm companies to fulfil their obligations to provide community plantations for local smallholders, and the growing number of Indigenous farmers wanting to cultivate their ancestral land for oil palm as a stable source of income. While communities are standing up for their land rights, it could also mean losing more forest cover, and potentially infringing RSPO’s no-deforestation rules, which were tightened in 2018 to include secondary forest.

Through regenerative agriculture trials, Kaleka is trying to find ways for smallholders to cultivate oil palm more sustainably, without reducing their incomes. To date, the organization has supported 220 independent smallholders across seven villages in Seruyan in adopting organic farming and agroforestry methods, alongside developing alternative livelihoods aimed at reducing reliance on oil palm over time.

Just over half of the participants are smallholders from Indigenous Dayak communities, who are mostly relative newcomers to the palm oil supply chain (making up 58% and 88% of participants in the organic farming and agroforestry trials respectively). Transmigrant farmers, who were incentivized to settle in Kalimantan during the oil palm expansion boom over recent decades and who own most of the existing smallholder plantations, are also taking part in the program.

Mongabay spoke to Silvia Irawan, Kaleka’s founder and chief strategy officer, on how the regenerative agriculture trials are working and her hopes they will provide solutions to these conundrums.

Mongabay: Why is Kaleka working with independent smallholders on the regenerative agriculture trials?

Silvia Irawan: In Seruyan, natural forest is still in the upper part, in the southern part is peatland, but in the middle the oil palm plantations cut across the entire district – it is one of the major palm oil producing regions in Indonesia. The plantations are organized in a monoculture setting, so there is a high intensity of chemical inputs for fertilizer and pesticide. Local communities are mostly learning from oil palm plantation companies, believing it has to be done this way maximize productivity and get more profit.

We started the first trial three years ago with organic detergent brand Seventh Generation, a subsidiary of Unilever, because they wanted to trial regenerative agriculture with smallholder farmers. By the end of 2025 there will be around 225 farmers that we are helping in transitioning their practices from using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to organic methods. So, they will apply organic fertilizer, they will do organic mulching and pest control, and make sure the land has legume cover so it will not be bare.

They produce their own organic fertilizer in the village by collecting biowaste from the surroundings and they use it to replace chemical fertilizer, which lowers production costs. For example, in one village, they collect waste from oil palm tree cuttings, in another village they have an abundance of water lilies in the lakes, so communities are collecting and making fertilizer out of that.

Currently around 70% of the farmers are now using organic fertilizers combined with chemical inputs, and it’s quite encouraging to see that local communities want to adopt this more and more.

In another trial we are planting around 30% oil palm in a 25-hectare agroforestry setting mixing with fruit trees, including banana, mango and durian and timber species, so it’s not a monoculture setting. This was previously degraded bare land that if not appropriately managed, weeds will dominate the area and can be fuel causing uncontrolled wildfires. Economically, these lands are considered underutilized, so tree planting can add value to the lands.

This is a new practice for the communities, and they were against it at the beginning because they didn’t see that it is possible to grow oil palm with other species, but now we have a demonstration site more people are  willing to try this approach.

Mongabay: What are the environmental benefits of these regenerative agriculture strategies?

Silvia Irawan: For the first group, the main target is to give back to the soil, so that it will be healthy for generations to come because if you put too many chemicals into it or you don’t treat the soil properly then the soil will decline over time. So, we are changing those practices by reducing the use of chemicals in the soil, we hope that will increase the quality of the soil.

We have a control plot to compare against the area where they have stopped using chemical fertilizer. We also check the water quality in the surrounding area where there is high turbidity and nitrate levels, so at the beginning of the process we do the baseline assessment to understand what’s the situation and then we check again.

The most interesting changes in the year and half based on our monitoring data is we see an increase of earthworms where we have regenerative agriculture, and a decrease of the bulk density of the soil, so it’s becoming loose, and also has decreased acidity. We also have better water quality, with turbidity and nitrate levels going down.

These are the ecosystem changes in the soil and water and it’s quite significant that you can actually see that the soil color is different; in our demonstration area it’s darker which shows there’s more carbon in there and organic materials, whereas the soil in the control plot is more orange.

It’s changing local community knowledge, now we have a demonstration plot, the farmers can see there wasn’t that much reduction in productivity. And, anecdotally, farmers using the organic methods are reporting that during the dry season their productivity is actually better than those applying chemical fertilizer because with the organic fertilizer you basically try to make sure there is legume cover so that the humidity can be maintained, even without rain.

For the agroforestry trial, it’s basically ecosystem restoration. Theoretically, we can expect the benefits from increasing the tree species, such as increased pollinators and suppression of weeds/pests. It is too soon to see the ecosystem benefits of the agroforestry trial, except for the most obvious, such as the increased tree species in a plot.

Mongabay: One of the key challenges that is coming out of the jurisdictional approach in Seruyan is how to resolve land conflicts without putting more pressure on forests, what is the situation and what role could regenerative agriculture strategies such as these play in providing a solution?

Silvia Irawan: With the jurisdictional approach the district government has proactively enforced companies’ obligations to build community plantations, which didn’t materialize for many years. This then puts more pressure on remaining forests as most lands belonging to local communities currently have regrowth secondary forests.

Additionally, more and more indigenous farmers, seeing the profits that their transmigrant peers are making, are wanting to use their land to join the palm oil supply chain. Legally, they are entitled to convert their land to oil palm.

However, because Seruyan is committed to getting 100% RSPO certification, if this land is cleared for oil palm it would be hard for them to get certification as the no-deforestation rules include secondary forest. Ironically, they could clear and plant any other commodity on their land. Indigenous people have inherited land which has forest cover, so there is an opportunity cost for them with the jurisdictional approach.

So, what we are keen to test in Seruyan, is whether it is possible to pick an area of forested land for selective cutting to plant oil palm trees, for example, in a 1-hectare area, you will only have around 20 or 30% of oil palm that can be planted, so then you need an alternative solution. We haven’t trialed this on the ground yet, but we want to show that with an agroforestry setting it can happen.

Mongabay: So, an agroforestry strategy could be a compromise within these no-deforestation requirements?

Silvia Irawan: Yes, by allowing them to still make money out of their own land, but then you need to compensate them for the no-deforestation policy. That’s the challenge that we need to talk about, because you can’t really ask them to do something without compensation, they are poor communities and still need to send their children to school.

Mongabay: How would this compensation work?

Silvia Irawan: The idea is that the regenerative agriculture intervention is embedded into a living income component so that the communities can have enough from their farming practices to pay for their expenses. We try to find out the living income gap based on household surveys and the minimum salary scale which is set by the government as $300-400 per month.

So, in Seruyan we are also supporting communities to develop alternative livelihoods to fill the living income gap, including building aquaculture ponds for breeding tilapia and shrimp and planting alternative commodity crops such as patchouli and ginger, so that they’re not depending on one crop, which also carries risks.

As part of our incentives for local communities, we are giving seedlings and training for processing. But we also need to build the industry and connect them with the buyers, which is really quite a challenge. One possibility could be connecting them with Unilever, which is investing in the district to support the production of sustainable palm oil, , so we are talking with them about how they can use palm sugar from Seruyan.

Mongabay: What are the learnings coming out of the regenerative agriculture trials in Seruyan that would enable these strategies to be replicated more widely?

Silvia Irawan: For regenerative agriculture to fly, you need to first make sure you have all the supplies and facilities in place so that communities can adopt these practices. One of the challenges at the very beginning is to find the organic materials that they can use for fertilizer, as it can take several months to build up enough organic material to use at scale and requires a production house.  In some communities the village budget is being used to build a production house. We are also encouraging the district government to invest in these facilities.

The second thing is that smallholders need to see evidence of success so that they start seeing their peers doing it, and we need to show the data on the ground because unless you overcome the barrier of having a success model, you can’t convince others to do it on their own for it to become a movement.

We are currently doing a statistical analysis, and we are hoping to produce the data a couple of months from now. The idea within Kaleka is to try to solve these systemic problems at scale, so we are doing action research that means identifying the problems communities are facing and then you come up with a solution and you try the solution with them, then you start to realize the reality on the ground, so helping the farmers is our main purpose, but the knowledge we get from our research is a by-product of that. I believe there is a solution with regenerative agriculture, but you have to be patient enough to trial it over again until you find a working solution.

Editor’s note: Silvia Irawan has a research background in environmental management and development. She founded Kaleka in 2014. She will step down from her executive role at the end of November 2024, but will remain affiliated with Kaleka as a supervisory board member.

Banner image of a cut oil palm fruit by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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AgroforestryEnvironmentForestsGreenHabitat LossIndigenous CommunitiesIndustrial AgricultureInterviewsOil PalmPalm OilPlantationsRainforestsRegenerative production landscapesSustainabilityTropical ForestsAsiaCentral KalimantanIndonesiaKalimantanSoutheast Asia

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