# Labour Shortage and Unharvested Yield New from the **18 Aug 2026** call, and arguably the second-strongest problem in the corpus after compliance — because unlike compliance, it destroys value directly. ## The mechanic - Mature trees are harvested on a **15-day cycle**. - There are **not enough harvesters**, so a significant share of the plantation goes **unharvested during the harvest window**. - Fruit not cut on cycle is fruit lost. The window does not wait. Meanwhile **global demand for palm oil exceeds supply** — so every unharvested block is a deficit against a market that would have paid for it. ## Why it matters to Rimau > [!tip] It converts a compliance product into a P&L product > The MSPO wedge sells relief from a cost and a chore. Harvest-labour allocation sells **recovered revenue** — which is a different, better conversation with an owner who does not care about software. And the data required is the same data: MSPO evidence already covers **how manpower is allocated**. Labour deployment, harvest scheduling and block-level completion are byproducts of the compliance record, which makes this a natural early candidate for turn two of [[Rimau/The Flywheel and Rimau Sentient|the flywheel]] — arguably ahead of OER analytics, because the estate (not the mill) is the customer Rimau already has. ## The constraint that shapes any answer Mechanisation is not a free lever. Families cannot survive on a single income, and estate owners **actively weigh the social cost** of removing manual roles — see [[Rimau/Workforce and the Social Layer]]. So the credible product is **better allocation of the harvesters you have**, not fewer harvesters. That is consistent with the company's own doctrine: *people run the field, the platform runs the filing.* ## To quantify 1. What percentage of blocks actually goes uncut per cycle, at a real estate? 2. What is the revenue loss per hectare per missed cycle? 3. Is the shortage absolute (no workers available) or allocative (workers in the wrong blocks)? The product only helps with the second. 4. How does it interact with the undocumented-labour reality — can a scheduling tool even record these workers? ## Related - [[Rimau MOC]] - [[Rimau/Workforce and the Social Layer]] - [[Rimau/Plantation and Mill Economics]] - [[Rimau/The Flywheel and Rimau Sentient]] - [[Rimau/Open Questions and Numbers to Reconcile]]