Cassava peels’ commercialisation viable with growing usage

With increasing use of cassava in the production of cassava chips for bread, starch, ethanol and other products within the country, cassava peels usage is on the rise. Already, some cassava farmers and processors earn extra income drying cassava peels and selling to livestock farmers.

But the fact that cassava peels processing for other uses is still done by smallholder farmers/processors with little or no formal education and usually in rural areas has limited its widespread use. As more young educated individuals take up its processing to use or sell, the opportunities it holds for income generation are much.

Researchers, from animal production departments of universities, have carried out quite a number of researches on use of cassava wastes as alternative feed sources in livestock and sometimes fish feeds. Though cassava peels are now recognised internationally as alternative feed sources, the usage is more common among smallholder farmers that constitute over 70 percent of farmers in Nigeria and most sub-Saharan African countries.

Cassava peels are used mainly by farms situated near major cassava producing areas or farms that practise integrated system, growing cassava as well as livestock

In Nigeria, as part of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda driven by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, full utilisation of every part of cassava is encouraged and this is also encouraged by some organisations, NGOs, and international donor agencies that aim at poverty alleviation.

Until about 10 years ago, cassava peels were mainly used for feeding pigs, but with the cassava revolution that began few years ago, its use has been expanded to include in feeding other livestock; it is dried and chopped into flakes or grits to feed smaller livestock like poultry. Some users also sieve after grinding to reduce unwanted particles in the feeding of poultry.

Kolawole Adebayo, a lecturer at the department of agricultural extension, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), said sometime ago in Abeokuta, “cassava peels can be sun-dried on a black polythene sheet to speed up the rate of drying and spread on a raised cemented platform. That way the poisonous cyanide contained in wet cassava peels is removed.”

Bolanle Ogunlolu, former PhD student of FUNAAB and a 2010 fellow of the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), said: “We discover that feeding dried cassava peels to ruminants helps in improving their digestibility and therefore productivity.”

Kuburat Toriola, a cassava processor in Ikango Village, Abeokuta, Ogun State, is one of the trainees of Adebayo. According to Toriola, “farmers now use cassava peels in feeding pigs, ruminants and poultry. The dried cassava peels are however milled before they are added as energy source in poultry feed to replace maize.”

The Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi (FIIRO) in Nigeria also recently, in a waste-to- wealth initiative under the cassava value chain improvement, has been teaching the use of cassava peels in the growing of mushroom. The project, which was in collaboration with the FUNAAB, was sponsored by Gratitude, an international body. The FIIRO researchers carried out on-farm demonstration of cassava wastes utilisation technology.

Riskat Lawal, one of the beneficiaries of the free training by FIIRO, said she followed the process taught to the letter and got results harvesting the mushrooms every three weeks. She and her family consumed the mushroom to enrich their diets but did not have enough to sell.

Because the process is often very technical and the fact that some of the chemical powders (calcium carbonate and calcium sulphate) used for the process are not easily available, some of the women did not get result – the growing of mushrooms when they tried it on their own after the training.

Yemisi Ashimolowo, coordinator of Gender Development Initiative, said: “We are thankful to the sponsors of the Cassava Value Chain (CAVA) project as our women have successfully grown mushroom after the training.” Responding to the fact that some women did not record success, she said: “I feel lack of success recorded in the second trial has to do with the environment in which the mushroom was raised. The successful trial was raised under a tree, on shrubs while the second one was raised on a pavement at the back of the building. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture has also been carrying out several researches on cassava, most of which can be commercialised by interested private sector players by liasing with the institute to acquire the technology.

OLUYINKA ALAWODE