Cashew Moisture Meter | Digital Moisture Meter for Cashew Nuts

Physical Handling Storage, and Storage Losses due to Moisture.

The following is the physical process of assembling, transporting, and storing cashew nuts prior to export. The women who harvest the cashew nuts bring them to village-level assembly points in small (10 to 20 kg) units. In some cases, the meeting point is on the cashew plantation. In other cases, the assembly point is at the intermediary merchant’s location. The assembly point for truck-based merchants is wherever the truck stops. Unless purchased by a truck-based purchasing enterprise, cashew nuts are stored in bulk at the assembly point until sufficient quantities are gathered for cost-effective shipment to Bissau. The nuts are packaged in used burlap bags (usually rice sacks) and hand loaded onto ten-ton trucks for shipment to Bissau. As part of the purchasing agreement, merchants who buy cashew nuts from plantations frequently include sacks, sacking, and truck loading services. The nuts are purchased without regard for quality or moisture content, with no price premiums or discounts for quality or moisture content, as is customary in developed-world commodity markets. The cashew nuts are frequently emptied from their sacks and stored in bulk behind retaining walls made of sacked cashew nuts at the Bissau warehouse. Weight loss during storage is caused by moisture loss in the cashew nuts. Physical harm is insignificant or goes unnoticed. Merchants reported losses ranging from 3 to 15%. Clearly, the amount of loss during transport and storage is proportional to the moisture level of the nuts when purchased and the length of storage. There is no attempt to determine the moisture level of the nuts at the time of purchase, nor is there any attempt to control the humidity of the warehouses. As a result, merchants appear to make no effort to control losses during storage. This could be related to the level of competition: the nuts must be purchased as soon as possible after harvest to avoid being purchased by competitors. Moisture levels and storage losses may become issues if producers or intermediary merchants store crops for longer periods of time before selling to exporting merchants. If this happens, producers or middlemen may be able to charge a premium for nuts with specific moisture levels. This necessitates the development of a simple method for determining moisture content. If international buyers are willing to pay a premium for these characteristics, nut quality and size may become a concern. At higher levels in the market channel, there are significant price differentials for cashew kernel size and condition. This implies that the feasibility of grading cashew nuts before selling to international buyers should be investigated.