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    Dry­ing man­goes saves farm­ers post-har­vest loses

                Mango Drying- Value Addition.jpg

    Mango farm­ers can save up to 60 per­cent post-har­vest loses caused by lack of ready mar­kets by dry­ing man­goes and crush­ing them into powder. This way they will be in­creas­ing their shelf-life and get­ting more value out of them.

    The powdered man­goes are easy to mar­ket be­cause con­sumers will not be wor­ried as to when the product will go bad. In this case yoghurt com­pan­ies, cake bakers and even juice makers are just some of the po­ten­tial buy­ers not to talk of nu­mer­ous house­holds which eat fruits as part of healthy liv­ing.

    In Kenya the har­vest­ing sea­son for man­goes in most parts of the coun­try es­pe­cially in Ukam­bani and cent­ral Kenya re­gions starts from Oc­to­ber through Feb­ru­ary. To avoid re­oc­cur­ring of wastage due to lack of ready mar­ket and the fact that man­goes are fast-per­ish­able goods, farm­ers in these re­gions have come up with solar drier sys­tem which help them dry their man­goes re­du­cing the cost of pro­duc­tion.

    Kam­biti vil­lage in Mur­ang’a County is a good ex­ample with farm­ers who dry their man­goes for value ad­di­tion. Farm­ers in this area do ex­per­i­ence in­ad­equate rain­fall and the best they have found doing well is mango farm­ing.

    READ ALSO: Middle East mar­ket craves for more Kenyan man­goes

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    READ ALSO: Dry­ing ve­get­ables in­creases shelf life to over eight months

    They have formed farm­ers group, Kam­biti East Mango Self Help where they use bio­mass solar driers and grinders whose job is to con­vert dried mango peels into fine powder which to them some are used in mak­ing por­ridge. Bio­mass solar driers can be made at home of pur­chased the ready-made while grinder costs Ksh90,000 or an elec­tric one that costs Ksh400,000 for com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion.

    In­stead of selling their man­goes at five or seven shil­lings each, the already pack­aged powdered man­goes can fetch more cash ac­cord­ing to the weight. For more in­come one needs 120 man­goes to pro­duce 1 Kilo­gram of Powder which goes for Ksh1,000 on the mar­ket. 120 man­goes will cost you Ksh300 in the farm thus triple re­turns after value ad­di­tion.

    In real sense Ksh10,000 worth of man­goes would give you roughly Ksh30,000 in re­turns. Ksh100,000 worth of man­goes would give you Ksh300,000 in re­turns and this goes on de­pend­ing on the in­vest­ment ap­plied.

    Mango farm­ers in most parts of the coun­try can enjoy such re­turns es­pe­cially those in semi-arid East­ern re­gion like Kir­inyaga, Mur­ang’a, Embu (Ishiara) and even Kitui which pro­duce over 60% of Kenya’s mango har­vest per year.

                 mango-powder-organic-freeze-dried.jpg

     

     

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