Banana production

Harvesting takes place once a week and lasts for two full days. Selected banana stems with fruit ready for harvesting are carefully cut from the plant and carried to the cableway where the fruit is transported to the packing house.

The bananas are then gently deflowered by carefully taking the withered dried flowers from the end of the banana. At which point the bananas are cut into manageable hands and the stems are then taken away by tractor to be composted.

The bananas are then immersed into a huge tank of fresh water and ‘delatexed’ - in other words the latex on them is washed away. The fruit is cut into clusters of between four to nine fingers and then checked for both quality and size as only the best fruit will be exported. Other fruit is loaded into crates to be sold at the local markets nearby in Accra, Tema and Aflao. Broken or bruised fruit is given out to livestock farmers as animal feed and other vegetative parts of the banana plant are returned to the field to become mulch or compost.

The blue bags used for covering and protecting the fruit are recycled. The coloured plastic ribbons tied to the stems whilst the bananas are growing, which show the stage of development of the fruit, are re-used together with the twining ropes. The latex oozing from the banana crowns during the washing and delatexing process is separated from the effluent water and the water is oxidised and returned to the surface water.

Waste water from the packing stations is passed through a charcoal filter and then flows into the Volta river through drainage channels dug throughout the plantation. Monthly water quality tests upstream and downstream from the plantation administered by Kpong waterworks have revealed that the water quality remains excellent.

To protect the fruit against fungal attack during shipment, the crowns are treated with Citrex, an organic fungicide. When there is a heightened risk of crown-rot (May-June), there is an additional treatment involving spraying the banana fruit with Citrex and dipping the crowns. The bananas move slowly by conveyor belt where they will be packed into specially reinforced boxes lined with plastic and each carton is weighed to ensure that each has a minimum weight of 18.14kg.

The boxes are put into pallets and transported to the cooling chamber for pre-cooling. VREL pioneered the development of pre-cooling facilities in Ghana as a measure to reduce crown-rot incidence during the 19-day shipment period. Pre-cooling was investigated when VREL Organic realised that the standard refrigerated containers could not be adjusted for temperature as they are designed to refrigerate only already cold produce.
VREL’s 30 ton pre-cooling facilities reduce the internal temperature of the bananas from +/- 27 degree Celsius to +/- 16 degree Celsius within 24 hours. This greatly enhances the quality of the fruit. After pre-cooling, the bananas are loaded into refrigerated reefer containers. These are transported to Tema port, awaiting arrival of the vessel.

Once arriving at their destination, the bananas are unloaded into specially refrigerated trucks and transported to the ripening centres where they are loaded into special ripening chambers and ripened according to the customers taste. The bananas are then checked again for quality and wrapped or hand-bagged and labelled for the customer and, ultimately, the consumer.