Pineapple farming in Nigeria is another sure money maker. Thousands of fruit juices are made with pineapple and the makers of fruit juice are always on the look out for pineapple farm where they could buy their raw material. Go to mile 12 market or any market near you or even the fruit sellers near you and try to price pineapple. Then you will realize that pineapple is edible gold.

One head of pineapple is sold for N200 in the local market while the same head of pineapple goes for N300+ in the fruit shops. For wholesale farmers, they sell for N70 – N100. Lets assume you harvested 200,000 pineapple and decided to sell for just N50 for wholesale, you will make a whooping N20 million. Takeaway N8 million as cost of production, labour, and transportation, you will have N12 million as pure profit. And once they starts producing, they can fruit for the next 10 years if well maintained.

Now you see what I am talking about? If you are thinking of a profitable farming business to start in  the country, then think no more, pineapple is the current money spinner. This sweet fruit also known as “ANANAS COSMOSUS” is as sweet as the profit it can generate.

Pineapple has a worldwide appeal and is known for its nutritional and health values all over the world. How the fruit got to Nigeria may not really be our main concern in this article but the business aspects of planting and how lucrative it is. Nigerian soil and weather are extremely good for pineapple farming too.

Now that you know the profit that awaits you in pineapple farming, let us go straight into the processes needed in pineapple farming and how it could be done profitably and professionally for maximal benefit.

Steps By Step Pineapple Cultivation In Nigeria

Chose A Good Site – First of all, making a good selection of the site to have pineapple planted is usually the paramount thing to do. The site has to be checked for the soil textures because pineapple thrives very well on sandy soil with lots of nutrients, good water retention, coupled with the humid conditions of the chosen field for planting.

Clear The Farmland – The next thing to do is to have the area cleared of stumps and thereafter prepare the land by ploughing or making some raised beds for the planting. Bear in mind also that the crop requires a place where the rainfall is evenly distributed during the early periods of planting; and this is very important to get good yields and sweet produce at the same time.

While preparing the ground for planting, be on the look out for some possible insects attackers but which is usually handled by overturning the soil and exposing it to sunlight. You can do it manually or mechanically with a tractor to plough and ridge the place because it is not the best to plant on a flat ground because of easy penetrations in the ground.

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Acres of Newly Planted Pineapple Farmland

Select The Desired Specie – Some of the most desirable species suitable for commercial pineapple farming are: The Smooth (or Smooth Leaf Cayenne) pineapple; Pure Gold pineapple specie (newly developed); The Gold Crown. Get the pineapple that you will plant. Its always good to know there are two basic ways to go about pineapple planting, you can either plant the sucker or the crown. What this means is that pineapple sucker is not the same as the crown.

The sucker is the shoot-out by the side of a pineapple and it takes lesser time to grow than the crown which takes up to a year and two months as against the sucker of about nine months. And getting the sucker is far easier than getting the crown.

Another interesting things about pineapple is that it could be planted at the backyard if you have enough space there, which even serves as flowers at the same time, but that’s by the way but it goes further to buttress how easy it is to start pineapple farming.

Commercial Pineapple Farming

If you decide to go into pineapple farming in a big way of which I am recommeding, then there are certain things to get right before planting. As mentioned earlier, the first step is usually to choose a very good soil that is well drained and less sloppy, but if every other things are OK except the sloppiness, then making ridges across the slop would prove beneficial against erosion.

Also make sure that the soil is well drained and soft for the root of your crops to have easy access to the ground for the needed nutrients from the soil. Always pay special attentions to the cultivars used.

I mean, those parts of pineapples to be planted because it goes a long way to determine how long your crops take to germinate and it’s important that most of the ones to be planted should be gotten between six to eight weeks after harvesting and have them exposed to the sun for about a week to kill off some likely parasites that may attack them when planted.

Spacing them is also very important for proper growths as each one absorbs just enough nutrients from the fertilizers instead of two or three closely planted struggling for manures, spacing also assist in weeding and making sure that it is free from insects. For instance, proper spacing would have about 50,000 plants per hectare instead of multiplying that by two or more.

Market research plays good role in assisting a person to know the very species to concentrate on instead of planting the type that has less market because of the preferences in the area and what people like to buy. Going into pineapple farming is lucrative in ways that many people may not know as I have explained at the beginning.

The Business Opportunities In Pineapple Farming

A sucker of pineapple goes for N20, N30 and (N40 for the treated ones). It is advised to go for the treated ones because it has greater survival rate than the untreated.

Now, let’s calculate for small scale pineapple farmers – For a sizable land, assuming you buy 5,000 suckers which is 40×5000 = N200,000 add the cost of labor, herbicides, transportation, fertilizer and the rent of the land if its not your own and every thing amounting to about N300,000.

Presently, one pineapple goes between N100 to N150 if you are selling in bulk but, put yours at N120 per pineapple and multiply that by 4,500 since not all may likely survive, that gives you N240,000 pure profit in a single harvest and now think of what that would mean for the next ten years or more that the pineapples will be producing.

So you can see the huge profit there for both small scale and commercial large scale farmers? And one can even start with less amount like N10 or N20k and partner with the retailers for easy disposing and gradually grow his business to a top level and have processing companies buying from him.

Pineapple farming is not a quick way of money making but a sure way of making sustainable income over time. If taken seriously as a business, pineapple farming is sure to get a person stabilized financially in life.

Pineapple has wider appeal than we could ever think of and there are even so many ways that it could be preserved now through some modern techniques which we will be uncovering in our future article on pineapple and its usages.

For now, go ahead and start looking for land where you can plant your pineapple this year. Drop your question below and make sure you share this on Facebook and Twitter using the button provided for it.