Oil palm business, Lucrative but Labour Intensive

Palm trees are one of the richest plants in history. This is true because none of their products are a waste. Let me start by listing almost a complete overview of its parts and their uses.

• The trunk can be used as a rafter for building houses (roofing); these same rafters can be used to build temporary furniture. This same trunk, when dug from the palm tree neck and covered for long, can produce a local fresh palm tree alcohol.

• The leaves can be piled out of its stalk to make brooms.

• The seed, when broken, can be eaten as nuts or can be industrially refined to produce oil.

• The shaft from the pulp or mesocarp after the oil has been squeezed can be used as a sponge or in setting up fires; it burns very fast.

• The endocarp, or shell that covers the kernel directly, can also be used for fire making on the seashore or for people that use firewood for cooking.

My Diary On Palmoil Extraction,

Today, I will be sharing with you my journey of processing palm oil, specifically from oil extraction. I will be taking you through the local, semi-mechanised steps involved in transforming fresh palm fruits into high-quality palm oil. This is more of a diary because, in the course of processing palm oil, my whole day was spent in the mill to bring this to completion.

	Grinder
Grinder Engine	Kernel Grater
	Manual Presser

So already the fire was set below this big black drum, as we call it, a day before, and what we had to do was rekindle the fire and wait to see another set of steams accompanied by a scent of the cooked palm fruit.

We can't scoop from the pot directly to the grinder because you can beat the speed of grinding, so a water bath is placed just beside the grinder, and all the boiled fruits are filtered in here. After all, the person in charge of grinding them will pack them pail by pail into the grinding machine. When the grinding is in progress, the water that was used in boiling these fruits will be poured into the machine. Remember, all fruits cannot enter at the same time. For this particular grinding session, we grinded in almost 6 batches because the fruits were so much. This is the first time we had so much palm fruit. All the water is not poured at once; a pail or two is poured in for each batch. After grinding the first one, it is poured out. It is done this way till all grinding batches are complete.

All this grinded palm pulp is channelled to the gutter meant for it; after this, it is then taken to the pressing machine. This mechanical machine is operated manually; the basket is centralised so that it doesn't shift from the middle rod. After the centralising, the palm pulp is collected from the gutter from which it was channelled to, and it is poured bit by bit to the basket brim, and then the other constituent of the manual pressing machine is fixed, and the torque is screwed on the middle rod. This is how pressing continued till all the oils were extracted.

	Sweating after processing

For the first time since we began palm oil processing (extraction), we were able to extract 90 litres of palm oil. Just like the bitcoin market is with the unstable movement of prices of commodities, so is the market value of this palm oil in the market, and for those selling in drums, it is calculated per 25-30 litres. For 25 litres of rubber, you can sell it at N40,000-45,000, so in total, a day of processing palm oil gave us approximately N150,000. I believe in a year from now, we will gather palm oil stocked in drums, which will be worth over N2M.

The plots we collected so far at the start of this business were on mortgage loans, which we can only give back this land if the owner refunds the money he got from us. We have other plots that we will be renewing payment yearly, and we also have our personal landed property with some stands of palm fruits. With this, the business will continually grow. I wish I could get a machine that could separate the squeezed pulp from the palm kernel seeds.

_{When work didn't start I looked fresh like fine wine}

If you could remember, when I wrote about how agriculture could be easier with machinery, palm oil processing is labour-intensive and time-consuming; it requires more hands to complete it. Fortunately, our neighbours helped us in separating the dry pulp; we re-pressed the pulp, and more oil came out. The hand is used in picking out the seeds; this is one of the most stressful parts of palm oil processing. In the end we brought everything to completion by individual efforts.

Want to start a palm oil business? You can contact me, and then I will give you a breakdown of the requirements and how to start us. I remain your business tycoon, NSIJORO.