PANDAMATENGA FARMS STEPS UP

Pandamatenga Farms are embarking on an ambitious new project to produce cooking oil from home grown sunflowers.

Production Manager, Dewald Els revealed they started building the machines for the plant in May 2022 and expect processing to be up-and-running by January 2023.

“We as Botswana are importing most if not all sunflower oil. The demand is extremely high. If we look at edible oil in Botswana, the average consumer consumed 7.31l in 2022; that means the country needs 14million liters of edible oil every year,” he explained.

With current prices still painfully high, and a 2-litre bottle of cooking oil likely to set one back around P65, they will compete with the prices by dropping them so they can be available to Batswana.

The project setup comprises of storage space for sunflower seeds and a processing plant, including two oil pressers as well as further storage tanks. Then cold-pressed sunflower oil is extracted from organic sunflower seeds and is unrefined, thus full of health-boosting nutrients.

“What we are basically trying to do is supply a market of about 500 to 1, 000 metric tons of sunflower that will be converted into oil per year,” he continued, describing Pandamatenga as a special economic zone.

Source: The VoiceNewspaper