Oil palm tree is a very popular plant. But perhaps, many people only know it as the source of raw material for making cooking oil.
In fact, many products can be made from the plant. Not only from its fuits, but also from its wastes. After being processed into Crude Palm Oil (CPO) and Palm Kernel Oil (PKO), its fresh fruit bunches (FFB) leave many wastes.
When speaking about wastes, our minds will perhaps just focus on useless things piled in slum places. Wastes are just unwanted things after the end of certain process.
But the empty palm fruit bunches are not the kind of waste that is useless. Why not? It’s because the empty bunches can be used as fertilizer without being processed. It can be also used as a medium to grow edible mushrooms.
It is easy to make the empty bunches as organic fertilizer as it does not need any certain process before. It can be directly placed around the plants we want and just let bacteria or other organisms process the bunches into compost and becomes organic fertilizers for the plants.
It can be also processed into a kind of chemical fertilizer by incinerating it into ashes. The ashes will have a high content of Kalium (K) that can be used as the substitute of MOP fertilizer. The use of the ashes will increase the pH of soil.
The other benefit of the empty bunches is its function as a medium to grow edible mushrooms. If the empty bunches put on soil unprocessed, then mushrooms will grow from it. Straw mushroom (Volvaliera volvaceae) is the kind of mushroom that can grow from the empty bunches. Cheap and delicious, it is the favorite of housewives. It is delicious if sautéed, mixed with noodles, or made into soup. It tastes delicious and chewy like chicken meat. (*)
Kompasiana.com