LizThis morning I flew with Claire Jones, my glamorous commercial pilot friend in her small safari plane across the vastness that is the Rift Valley from Naivasha to Athi River. We passed Mount Longonot and flew over the famous Ngong Hills, that resemble a row of knuckles on a fist. Whenever I see these green hills I’m always reminded of the first line of Karen Blixen’s famous Out of Africa “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills”. Actually she had a farm on the outskirts of Nairobi (the area of Karen was named after her), but that’s poetic license for you – at least she would have seen the Ngongs from her veranda view.
We landed on a grass strip on the edge of environmental researcher David Hopcraft’s ranch where we were met by Wayne Barrett of Earth Oils. I’d come to visit his oil processing plant at Athi River and to see some of the many wonderful botanical oils that pass through his doors here. A former farmer forced to flee his essential oil farm in Zimbabwe with little more than the shirt on his back, Wayne and his business partner Campbell have built a wonderful plant oil processing company, with high quality facilities to cold-press many different organically grown oils, including sweet almond, passion flower seed, macadamia nut and shea butter. It’s interesting to hear how these plant oils directly benefit so many small scale family farmers here in Kenya – and other African countries such as Uganda and Sudan too. For example, passion fruit juice is a popular drink here and many small farms sell their passion fruit to the juice pressers. Previously, the seed would have been discarded, but now, these families can in effect sell their crop twice – once for the juice and again for the seed oil. Even the left-over ‘cake’ of empty seed husks can be sold for high-protein animal feed so nothing is wasted. I especially admire the enterprise Wayne has set up for the local macadamia nut farmers: The nuts are collected from the small farmers and graded, with the best going to the snack food industry and the less perfect specimens going for oil processing. All the nuts are now used in this system and the left-over mulch again goes for animal feed – even the macadamia shell husks are used as renewable fuel for the oil pressing machine – a completely perfect eco-system with no waste and lots of benefit for the local economy (and the environment). Brilliant.
Wayne and I discussed many different plant oils – a shared passion – and I learnt a lot more about the way these liquid treasures are processed, which is just as important as how they are grown when it comes to assuring the best quality. Cold-pressing produces the highest grade as the oils are broken down by any form of heat, which encourages rancidity. Unfortunately, cold-pressing is very much harder to do as the cell structure of the oils is harder and so yields less oil. Cold-pressing is also time consuming and expensive, but the resulting oil is far superior. Earth Oils are committed to their cold-processing production and it was encouraging to make contact with a company as committed to quality ingredients as we are.