Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my blog.I wish to make my third entry for the ongoing contest in Steemalive community.

In this post I want to explain how to produce palm oil from Palm fruit.In Nigeria especially the south eastern part of the country.Palm oil is a very important item.It could be used for cooking, baking, making soap,detergents etc.Basically it is used for cooking in my place.You can barely prepare soup without palmoil.So It is a very important product.

Procedure for Producing Palmoil

•Cutting the palm fruit
This process involves cutting the palm fruit from the palm tree.Once it is ripe,it would cut and brought home for the next stage.

•Separating the palmfruit from the bunch
When the palmfruit was cut from the tree.It is usually in a bunch with sharp thorns.It has to be separated from the bunch using a machete.This process is tedious and requires patience and carefulness.

_{While still in bunch}

•Picking
The next step is picking.It involves manually picking the palmfruit one after the other.This is primarily done to make sure that the thorns are not mixed with the real palmfruit.Proper car should be taken to avoid been injured by the thorns.

•Cooking the palmfruit
After the picking.It is now time to put all the palmfruit in a big pot and set it on fire.The cooking is done inorder to soften the fruit ams make it easy for pounding.It would be allowed to boil and soften very well.

_{cooking process}

•Pounding the palmfruit
The next step is pounding.It is pounded while it is still hot.So one person pounds and the other person introduces the hot palmfruit into the big mortar as pounding is going on.

_{Inside the mortar after pounding}

This is a mechanical work and requires strength.In the course of the pounding,the red oil still start gushing out and the whole content would be introduced into a manually extractor.

•Extraction of the oil
A manual extractor is used to squeeze our red oil from the pounded content.The red oil would be dripping into a containers kept under the extractor.

It is obvious that the whole red oil won't come out at this point.So the chaff of the extracted content would be introduced into a basin full of water where it would be washed to separate the palm kernel-another important palmfruit product.That washing water is now shaken properly and the upper part which contains oil could be carefully collected with the palm and then transfered into another pot.It would them be allowed to boil and the the oily part of also extracted.This is the last point of palmoil extraction.The red oil can now be stored in containers for sell or usage.

Summary

In summary the processes as explained is how palmoil is produced manual in the Eastern part of Nigeria.Almost every household makes use of palmoil for one reason or the other.Palm oil can also be taken as a first aid when one swallows a poisonous substances.At the moment a litre of palm oil costs over 3 Steem.