By Tony Yayo
Due to the pains, drudgery and problems that rural and provincial farmers faced in the cracking of palm nuts, FINIC a small scale agro processing company doing the designing and manufacturing of post-harvest machines has invented a new manually operated machine to crack palm nuts.
This Palm nut cracker equipment is being introduced to help reduce the pains that farmers, especially women go through whilst cracking these nuts with their bare hands and stones and usually end up losing tonnes of unprocessed palm nuts and millions of dollars in agricultural revenue loses.
According to the Managing Director of FINIC, Foday Melvin Kamara, many farmers are leaving their nuts to waste because of the huge effort and time needed to crack them traditionally.
He added that they have decided to come up with such an invention to improve on the time use to process these nuts and also raised the yields of the local produce.
Foday Melvin Kamara also noted that the new machine is twenty times faster than the traditional method that is current being used by farmers.
The equipment he noted can be operated by one person manually and can also run with other forms of electricity efficiently.
He continued that the benefits of the new machine are very huge considering the huge numbers of palm oil farmers across the country.
Kailahun district alone according to him are over ten thousand palm oil farmers. He revealed that with this machine the industry will be able to save up to thirty million dollars from the previous waste of palm nuts.
Another benefit he noted is the huge effort it will bring in the fight against climate change in the country.
Foday Melvin Kamara continued that there will be several bye products from the fruits when you use this machine and also reduce the cutting up of trees or deforestation nationwide.
He assured farmers that the spares for the new machine are available in the country and also the low cost of the machine. FINIC Boss also revealed that they will be providing assistant to any farmer or group of farmers that brought this new machine.