Small-scale farms will usually cover an area of land about 7.5 hectares, and consist of a family who grows for their own needs and interplants tree crops. These farmers may use the traditional method of extracting palm oil, or they may sell it to various processors or manufacturers. Medium-scale farms can cover anywhere from 10 to 500 hectares, and are typically used for modern agronomic practices which include plant spacing, cover cropping, fertilization, ring weeding, and pruning. These farmers normally own processing facilities and sell what they grow and harvest. Large scale farms usually exceed 500 hectares, these consist of state-owned enterprises intended to meet export and consumption needs on a larger scale. These large-scale farms typically look to a foreign country for land and will employ the residents of the country on the plantation. These estates are becoming privatized or sold to privet interest to prevent the government from interfering as a business competitor. It is not uncommon that under this privatization, involves plantation output to be sold to small-scale processors (“Palm Oil …show more content…
The workers consist of both adults and children. Children primarily collect loose fruit, and load bunches of fruit before the oil is extracted. Men and boys often cut the fruit bunches down from the trees with a long seethe-like tool (punting poles). Continuous use of these poles can put strain on the musculoskeletal system. Girls and women are often responsible for gathering the fruit bunches ("Child Labour in Plantation”). A Pilot Acton Research on Hazardous Form of Child Labour in Palm Oil Plantation Sector in Indonesia conducted a study in 2002, interviewing seventy-five child labourers from nine to seventeen years of age, who worked on oil palm plantations in Indonesia ("Child Labour in Plantation”). The results concluded that eighty-five percent of these child workers are palm pickers, collecting the palm fruit and carrying sacks of palm fruits to carts. These loads, on average, weight about ten kilograms and are carried over a distance of 250 metres. Nearly seventy-five percent of these children did not have gloves, and as a result, suffered cuts, scratches, and abrasions. The majority of these children—ninety percent—did not receive any training before working, sixty-eight of these children regularly experience heat exhaustion. On average, these workers worked more than