Design of a Safe Way to Harvest Palm Wine Without Climbing Trees

Palm wine is a sweet, nutritious milky juice tapped from palm trees. In Southern Nigeria, especially the South East populated by the Igbo tribe; no ceremony, especially traditional marriage, can take place without palm wine. This has made palm wine tapping to become a lucrative trade. However, its production or tapping requires the tapper to climb tall trees to harvest the palm wine. This has made it unattractive to young people due to the fear of the tapper falling to death from such a scary height. Across the southern Nigeria and the middle-belt where this palm wine elixir is deeply appreciated, the population is over 150 million. This makes the palm wine tapping a huge business that needs modernization through innovative technology. Interestingly, the palm trees are littered in every community spanning from the Southern Nigeria to the middle-belt, making it a reliable raw material source, which makes the business certainly sustainable. In this innovative research, a vacuum-tubing technology (VTT) designed to suck the palm sap through the application of a suction force within a high pressure-versus-low pressure environment, between the tree trunk and the vacuum pump, is presented. This is intended to assist the tapper harvest the palm sap without climbing the tree.