Cooking oil production halted due to weather

THE production of cooking oil at the Shadikongoro irrigation project, situated some 180km east of Rundu, has been halted due to the current cold weather.

Shadikongoro project manager Floris Smith told Nampa that they stopped processing oil since the start of the winter because it is too cold, which makes the process of filtering the oil time-consuming.It also becomes expensive, as it uses a lot of electricity. ‘We are not in high production this winter season,’ said Smith. He explained that to extract oil from sunflower seeds, the room temperature should be above 20 degrees Celsius.Oil production at the project is expected to resume at the end of August.Due to the low quantity of oil produced, the project is at this stage unable to commercialise the cooking oil, and thus resorted to selling the oil to the local communities at a cost of N$11 per litre.Sunflowers for the project are grown on a 100-hectare piece of land, from where about 25 per cent of the project’s oil is extracted. To commercialise the cooking oil, the project needs to produce at least 8 000 tonnes of sunflower seeds per year. Nonetheless, Smith revealed that plans to commercialise the cooking oil process are on the cards, and a business plan has already been presented to the Minister of Agriculture, Water and Forestry, John Mutorwa.The design for the label of the cooking oil has also been registered with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, while a bar code was obtained and registered in Johannesburg, South Africa, last year.Different bar codes were registered, and will be displayed on the containers of the cooking oil – in 20ml, 25ml and 75ml bottles – once it gets commercialised. The nutritional value of the cooking oil was also registered in Cape Town, South Africa in the same year. The project has so far established a cooking oil processing plant, where 94 tonnes of sunflower seeds produce 25 000 litres of cooking oil.If plans to produce the cooking oil on a commercial basis succeed, the product might also be used as part of the government’s drought relief aid programme, and would become the first Green Scheme project to fully commercialise its products. – Nampa