Oil-Palm VS Cashew

Q:Between cashew and palm tree. Which one is better and advisable to plant?

A: One has to consider many things in taking decision abt which one to invest in. These are location, available fund, target market among other things.

✔Oil-palm & cashew have almost same set up cost/acre or cost/ha.
✔Both take abt 3-4yrs to start fruiting.
✔They both have same plant population/acre or per/ha.
✔While cashew can grow on fringe soil, almost anywhere with little rainfall, Oil-palm on the other hand grows better in the tropical rain forest with good rain fall.

To make (good) money from Oil-palm, the farmer must invest further in processing equipment. These investment runs into several 100's of thousands. Whereas, the farmer can make money from cashew without any other investment.

Q: Which aspect of the nuts is better to sell and make your money? Selling dried Cashew Nuts or Roasted?

A: Dried cashew nuts is known or called raw cashew nuts (RCN) in cashew business world. It is a lot easier to sell RCN rather than roasted but because of further investment needed for roasting. However, once roasted, it has become processed & hence attract much more income. Also, there are other very valuable by products of roasting or processing like cashew but shell liquid (CNSL) which is useful in many other industries.

Q: Without mechanized roasting and cracking, it is stressful to roast and sell in commercial quantity.

A: Yes, while it could be stressful, there are workers that will be (happily) gainfully employed doing the cracking using simple mechanical tools.
The point is, Nigeria need to shift away from our subsistence way/level of doing agriculture to a more commercial level.

Courtesy Pinfarm/CocoaMaster .......... +2348063249457