Why cultivate oil palms?

14. In traditional farming, nobody cultivates oil palms

People simply pick the clusters of fruit from the oil palms that grow in the forest.

But these oil palms produce little.

The oil is extracted by traditional methods, and a lot of oil is left in the pulp and the kernel.

But nowadays oil palms are grown on modem plantations.

These contain selected oil palms with big yields.

The clusters of fruit are sold to mills which extract all the oil from the pulp and the kernels.

These oil palm plantations bring in money

· for the growers who sell the fruit,
· for the workers who work in the mills,
· for the government which can sell the oil to foreign countries.

15. The growers can also earn money by raising beef cattle.

Beef cattle can be fed with the green fodder from the cover crop grown in the palm groves.

The grower can also feed his cattle with palm-kernel oil cake, that is, what is left over after extraction of the palm kernel oil.

Palm-kernel oil cake is a protein-rich food.