Cashew harvest

Down here at our field site if it isn’t forest, and it isn’t rice, then it’s almost always cashew. Cashew nuts are the favoured cash-crop for local people in and around the national park. Almost all of the forest surrounding the national park, and some of the forest inside it, has been converted to cashew plantations. 

These hills just outside of the national park are covered in recently planted cashew trees:

For most of the year the plantations don’t require the attention of their owners, but now as the dry season reaches it’s height, the cashew trees produce their famous nuts.

The first stage in the harvest is to clear the vegetation below the trees, usually by fire.

The nuts grow like little commas just below the fruits.

Some of the trees have fruit that is yellow, and some have fruit that is red. It isn’t a ripeness thing.

Local people set up camps inside the more remote plantations to harvest the cashew.

Then they wait for the fruit to fall to the ground. The lack of ground vegetation makes them easy to find.

In other countries where cashew nuts are harvested people pick them off the trees, so that they can crush the fruit to make juice (it tastes great). But here there’s no market for the fruit, so it just rots on the ground.

 

People harvest the nuts by just picking them up.

The nuts are dried in the sun

Then they’re put into sacks and taken to dealers by motorbike.

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