Malaysia’s next boom is buried in its soil

Malaysia’s next boom is buried in its soil


10 hours ago
K. Kathirgugan


The agriculture department's new smart irrigation system is a modest launch with a massive message: Malaysian farming is finally going digital. In a world where food exporters slam their doors shut at the first sign of trouble, we should pour fuel on this fire





Malaysian farming has never been short of sweat. What it has been short of is data.

This week, that started to change. On Aug 3, the agriculture department launched the Smart Irrigation Monitoring System, or SIMS, announced in Putrajaya by its director-general Nor Sam Alwi.

SIMS crunches temperature, humidity, wind speed and solar radiation through the Penman-Monteith FAO 56 formula, the international gold standard for calculating how much water a crop actually needs. Any farmer who registers gets a precise irrigation schedule for his crop and location, plus a 14-day weather forecast.


The ambitions attached to it are quietly serious. The department wants some 200,000 farmers on the system, rolled out in stages starting with 20,000, covering 38 major crops.

It expects SIMS to cut water wastage by more than 20% while trimming the energy bills of every mechanical pump in the land. That is real money in real pockets.

This might sound like a small thing. It is anything but.

Agriculture consumes about 70% of all the freshwater humanity withdraws, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Getting water right is often the difference between a farm that makes money and a farm that slowly drains its owner.


SIMS is also our first real step into one of the fastest growing industries on earth. Precision agriculture, the business of farming with data, sensors and satellites, was worth about RM39 billion globally in 2025 and is forecast by research and analysis provider Research and Markets to hit RM71 billion by 2031, compounding at 10.5% a year.

The countries that mastered this game punch absurdly above their weight. For instance, the Netherlands, with a landmass roughly a third the size of Peninsular Malaysia, has used greenhouse technology and data-driven growing to become the world’s second largest agricultural exporter by value.

There is no reason Malaysia, blessed with equatorial sun, fertile soil and rain all year round, cannot play this game too. So, what should we adopt next? Three things, each with a lever we can pull almost immediately.

First, drones. Enter Poladrone, a homegrown startup that raised RM18 million in 2021 in what was reported as Malaysia’s largest seed round at the time, and whose drones already spray and map paddy fields and oil palm estates.


Budget 2026 allocates a record RM2.62 billion in subsidies and incentives to paddy farmers, averaging RM4,300 per hectare per season. Let a slice of that be claimable for certified drone spraying and mapping services, so a smallholder can rent the future instead of having to buy it.

Second, open SIMS up. The system already knows what 38 crops need in every corner of the country, so publish that data through an open interface and let Malaysian startups build irrigation alerts, planting calendars and advisory apps on top of it.

Agriculture and Food Security Minister Mohamad Sabu has pledged that his ministry will keep modernising the agrifood sector under the National Agrofood Policy 2021-2030. Opening this data is the cheapest way imaginable to keep that promise.

Third, controlled-environment farming. Singapore, which farms almost no land at all, aims to produce 30% of its nutritional needs locally by 2030, largely through high-tech indoor farms.

If land-starved Singapore can grow vegetables in stacked trays, Malaysia’s cities have no excuse not to grow their own leafy greens.

I can hear you wondering: why the urgency?

Because the world is quietly telling us to feed ourselves. Our food import bill hit RM93.8 billion in 2024, up 19.1% in a single year, according to the department of statistics Malaysia.

By the ministry’s own recalculation, our rice self-sufficiency stands at just 56.2%, and the bulk of our imported rice comes from just three countries: Vietnam, Thailand and Pakistan.

Now recall what happens when the world gets nervous. In the months after Russia invaded Ukraine, at least 30 countries restricted food exports.

In July 2023, India, the world’s largest rice exporter, banned exports of non-basmati white rice practically overnight. When exporters get scared, they feed their own people first, treaties and trade ties be damned.

Food security is national security. We cannot have one without the other.

There is one more reason to bet big on aggrotech: our farmers are getting old. One in two plantation workers is now aged 40 and above, and few young Malaysians dream of a life swinging a cangkul.

But a farm run on drones, sensors and data is a different proposition altogether: less back-breaking labour, more career in tech.

As agriculture and food security ministry secretary-general Isham Ishak put it in July: “The question before us is no longer whether we have sufficient resources, but whether we have the determination to fully harness the assets already available to us.”

He’s spot on. The sun, the soil and now the software are all in place. All that’s left is for us to plant.