Hope you are ready to digest the long post (it’s a bit detailed to enhance better understanding).To cultivate groundnut is easy and profitable too. Knowing when and how to plant this crop can make you realize huge gain.

Groundnut is a crop that has a very high demand because of its usefulness in our economy. Uses of groundnut: can be eating (as fried, roasted or boiled), groundnut oil, making groundnut cake, feed for livestock etc. Groundnut only takes about three (3) – four (4) months to mature.

Another good thing about groundnut is that it can be cultivated two (2) times in a farming season. Now, let us head to the step by step of groundnut production.

STEPS IN PRODUCING GROUNDNUT

1. Land Clearing: Check land clearing as in potato cultivation.

2. Seed: If you don’t have your seed, you can head to the market and get the seeds. The quantity depends on the size of the land. You can roughly check while giving about 30cm space for each seed from each other. Practice on that gauging will lead to perfection of such quantification. Even when you have excess of the seed, you can still boil/roast/fry and eat or better make some oil for your kitchen need. You must not wait for big groundnut oil expeller to make your oil. You can use small manual oil press machine.

3. Tilling the Soil: InPotato processing, we made heaps but in processing groundnut, we just need to till the land. You can still clear the bushes in your previous yam or potato farm and level the heaps that remained after harvesting them.

4. Planting the Seeds: Planting groundnut can be done in March when you must have allowed about 3-4 rainfall on the land you have tilled for the cultivation. It is advisable to give good space of at least 25cm for each planted seed to aid good yield. At the time of planting groundnut, it might please you to add another crop like guinea corn. If you wish to plant guinea corn, read the step 5 but if you don’t, jump to step 6

6. Weeding & Manure: Weeding and adding manure to groundnut is the same as in potato. But, you have to weed the guinea corn twice since it takes about 5 -6 months for it to mature5. Adding Guinea Corn: If you want to inter-crop groundnut with guinea corn, you must first spread the guinea corn on the portion you want to plant groundnut so that while opening soil to put the groundnut seed, the sands will be covering the spread guinea corns to avoid birds from eating them up.

7. Harvesting: Harvesting should be around June/July. It takes only about three months for groundnut to mature.

8. Storage & Sales: After harvesting, you can sell out immediately or dry them well and store them for future sell. You can choose to process it further by making its edible oil which is of high demand. After making the oil, the cake that you pressed the oil out from is another product you can sell or convert for your livestock feed if you are keeping livestock

9. Planting for the Second Time: I will advise you to plant for the second time which normally kicks off in August to be harvested in December if you live anywhere in swampy areas (I mean where waters sprout out of the soil or where irrigation is possible). This is because harvesting the seconding planting in dry land is a big job. It will make you suffer. So plant the second if you live around such water area

10. These are the steps to follow. Now, let’s check the cost to cultivate a plot of land.
Clearing …………..… ₦2,000
Seed…………………. …. ₦500 (this depends on where you are, it can be cheaper though it costs higher during planting season)
Making tilling …….……₦2,000 (you can even do it yourself)
Total ……….…………….₦4,500
If all works out well you are going to get about 3 large bags of the groundnut (the bag, farmers in Nigeria call 27). As we usually do, your assignment now is to ask how much such large bag of groundnut is sold and multiply by 3. Then subtract ₦4,500 from it and see the gain yourself. If you dare to invest up to ₦45,000, calculate your profit!!! Check out the profit yourself so you don’t think it is manipulation. This is what you get in three months and you still have to add other crop which will improve your cool profit.