It’s probably not a stretch to say that plantations are the reason Medan has become such a large & busy city. It was interesting to drive out & visit a couple of them.
These burly looking palm trees produce clusters of seeds up top; just below the sprawl of palm leaves. There are a few types of these palm trees which have been engineered to produce the maximum amount of seeds, and grow shorter, to make the seeds easier to extract. Brilliant, right?

Next, the seeds are chopped off, loaded onto trucks and brought to Palm-oil factories, where they are boiled, separated from the unuseable part of the tree, and pressed into palm-oil used mainly for cooking.