From palm kernel to palm oil: The hidden story
From palm kernel to palm oil: The hidden story
By Bisi Olominu
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Palm oil is valuable, without it in the soup, it will lose its taste. From generation to generation, palm oil has become a veritable ingredient in various homes. It is an important and versatile vegetable oil which is used as a raw material by both food and non food industries. Every part of palm tree is useful economically and for domestic purposes.
Processing palm kernel to palm oil in the traditional way is simple, but tedious and inefficient. A day with the traditional processors of palm oil will tell you their pains, agony and crude way of making palm oil. Mere looking at their clothes and method of making palm oil will make you hate taking palm oil.
The women very early in the morning gather the palm kernel fruits in the farm, sweating profusely and treaking long distance to dump them at Oyo a palm oil precessing centre. It depends on how many bunch of the fruits that are on the farm, if many, they treak many times to gather the fruits and this make take some days before finishing the job.
It does not end there, they move to the sterilization of bunches, this involves cooking of the fruits to weaken the pulp structure, softening it and making it easier to detach the fibrous materials and its content during the digestion process. The women will use more than10 to 12 drums to cook the fruits to taste and thereafter dumping them to grounding machine, where there is no machine the women take it to Oyo and march the palm fruit with their legs to extract palm oil from the fruits. After marching the fruits, they thereafter pour enough water on the fruits, stir it very well and the palm oil will come to the water surface, this the women will gather, pour it on drums again, cook the oil for several hours, then oil is ready, this will be pour on 25litre keg for sale or use at home.
Speaking with The Hope on the making of palm oil, Mrs Florence Amos who has been in the business for 25 years disclosed that women went through lots of pains before producing palm oil.
“The local production of palm oil is tedious. From plucking the palm kernel on the trees where sometimes the pluckers encountered snakes, the pluckers will collect money and the women will come to take the fruits to Oyo, extracting oil from the kernel and processing very cumbersome. It is interesting but sometimes you will work from morning till evening, sleeping at night will be difficult. But since that is where we generate our money and job that we know best, we thank God almighty for everything.
Since we don’t have machine that could crunch the fresh fruit bunch that makes us go the traditional way of extracting palm oil. If we have machine, it will be easier for us and the extraction processes will be made easy.”
On why some women have to be inside the Oyo to extract palm oil despite been non hygienic, Mrs Amos said that is only the traditional way of extracting oil but noted that they make sure that those having their periods are not allowed to enter Oyo.
”If looking at the processes in the traditional way, many would not like to eat palm oil again, but since the final product is boiled thoroughly on fire, this has been purified”.
Also speaking, Mrs Udoh Abosede said that extracting palm oil from the beginning to the end may be cumbersome, but the final joy was that palm oil is produced. She maintained that demand for palm oil is rising in the country, noting that the product is now being exported to other countries.
“The manual processing techniques have been with Nigerians for long. It is not everybody that has the finance to take their products to bigger companies for extraction, this techniques have come to stay. In olden days we used our legs to march the cooked palm kernel in Oyo, but now there is improvement because we have machine that could separate the kernel thereby reducing our workloads.”
When asked about the hygienic nature of local production she said if people should look at that, many would not take oil or have anything to do with it. But he maintained that the environment in most farms may look untidy, but good palm oils are produced for people to consume.
” The environment in our farm is not that dirty and the women extracting palm oil are not that dirty as people portrayed. What comes out of this farm is a good products that we have been selling to send our children to schools and even higher institutions. What we produce here is real and good palm oil that has been tested as a good product. Many buyers are coming from the state and even outside the state to buy from us. It can be compared favourably with what is produced by company with big extracting machines.”
In her words, Mrs Boniface Esther said that oil being produced locally can compare favourably with those produced by big companies in Nigeria. She maintained that the local ones are even better and of good product. According to her, nothing was mixed with the local product, it is usually natural.
” To me the locally produce palm oil is better. No chemical is added. Although we heard that some companies are adding chemicals to their products, so also, we have in those producing palm oil locally. The intention is to make more profits, but to us in Aladodo Farm, we have integrity and we always subject our palm oil to integrity text.