My Experience Of Working In The Oil Palm Farm And How It Is Harvested In My Country

Hey there folks 👋,

I welcome you today to my blog. It's indeed a blistful day here and I'm so happy to be sharing with you people my experience working at the oil Palm Farm and how it is being harvested

Oil is usually extracted from palm which is why we called it palm oil. The cultivation of this palm oil is done all over my country Cameroon and it has suddenly turn into a lucrative business because of how the population has embraced in carrying out this activity

Cultivating and planting palm trees is always very easy to carryout but requires a lot of time for it to yield fruits. It usually takes about 4 years before it can be harvested. At that stage, the tree can continue to be producing oil fruits for about 30 years and at 30 years, this tree can be tall to about 40 feet very high in the air

This palm fruits usually grow in bunches or cons and each bunch usually weight between 10 to 25 kilograms. Each bunch usually has hundreds to thousand individual oil fruits dependent on its size and weight.

To know if the oil palm tree has ripen and it's ready for harvest, the fruits inside the bunches usually give a red-orange colour. This orange colour is always as a result of high concentrations of beta-carotene which is thesame type of organic pigment that is usually produce in sweet potato and carrots. A healthy and productive oil palm tree will always yield about 12 to 14 bunches or cons every blessed year

In all, working in an oil palm farm will always requires alot of patience, time, good skills and a highly fertile soil. The best climate that this oil fruit tree can survive is the both the tropical and subtropical climates, this two climate conditions are perfectly good for farmers to plant their palm trees. The rate of productivity of the oil palm is always depends mainly on type of soil, cultivation practice, the type of tree specie and how manageable one can do to manage it because it it is the best oil crop when we rate it in terms of yielding capacity

When the oil palm is ready for harvest, each tree most be climbed and dislodge using a very sharp cutlass. It's only skillful people In this field that can use a natural fiber plant or rope to climb the lofty height of the tree and harvest

The natural fiber plant is usually made of raffia palm tree and the rope is made o a length of fabric which is typically worn as a sash. But I will be explaining more on the use of natural fiber plant which is mostly used here in my country

The technician usually curt the softest tree and then arrange it probably which can be able to twine. It has a very special way of fixing it because if not we'll fixed, it will be very risky most especially as some oil palm trees are as tall as 40 feet long.

The image above is the side and front view of an example of a twine rope use in climbing an oil palm tree. You can see how it's twisted and it is very stiff and can never be destroyed anyhow. This natural fiber is always between 6 to 7 feet long. However, it always depends on the tree girth. This twine is usually fashioned in a round circle and tied in a high secured manna so that it can go loose when you climb the tree. This twine fiber is use as a brace in holding your waist hence making you to be able to scale the oil palm tree in an easy way

This is where the magic comes as we can see the mechanism of how this twine is fixed. Fixing this twin involves very special skills.

Below we can see how this skillful man does before climbing the oil palm tree

Climbing this tree requires alot of strength, technic and skills. Before climbing, the skillful man will need to untie the twine then tie it round the tree and and on to his waist. When he ties it, he ensures it's highly secured and can't get loosed at any point.

Climbing is a gradual process and takes one step at a time, the skillful man always ensures he has a cutlass which he uses to clear his passage like making small holes in the tree so that he position his legs firmly

When he succeeds in climbing, he then position himself at the top of the palm tree before starting harvest. If the tree is dirty and has dry branches, he cuts them off and clean the tree with his cutlass before taking off the bunches of palm oil

When the bunches are being harvested from the tree, it will be gathered and packed in hips(groups) and will need to be threshed and removed from inside the bunches. This fruit bunches usually consist of thousands of fruits which are embedded in spikelets which always grow in main stem. So when it's harvested, it's being threshed by cutting the fruit laden spikelets from its stem bunch with either the use of a cutlass or an axe. When this is done, the fruits can now be separated using the hands which is called hand picking

I will end here for today and in my next post, I will focus more on it's Sterilization stage which is the stage which Is the cooking stage as it is usually cooked using very high temperature and its usually cooked using hot water and it's usually the last stage before producing red-oil commonly known as vegetable oil

Before going home, I will love to invite @rmm31 to come and see how working at the palm oil farm is usually carried out in my country

My regards : @chiabertrand