How to Grow Shea

Vitellaria paradoxa · Also called: Shea (karité), Karité, Shea nut, Shea butter tree, Nku, Taama, Lulu, Okwuma

A mature shea tree with a thick dark deeply cracked trunk and a wide spreading crown of leathery leaves, standing alone in an open farmed field in northern Ghana.

Photo: Dnshitobu, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Shea is the largest source of cash income that most rural women across the West African savannah control directly. The tree grows wild in a belt of about twenty-one countries running from Senegal across to Uganda and Ethiopia, and the nuts are gathered, processed and sold overwhelmingly by women. The fat is a staple cooking fat locally and, internationally, a raw material for cosmetics and for the chocolate trade. Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo and Uganda are among the main producers. Almost none of it comes from plantations. It comes from trees standing in farmed fields, which is why this guide is mostly about protecting, gathering and processing rather than about planting.

Growing Shea, Stage by Stage

1. Protect the trees and the land they stand in — The first job in shea is not planting. It is deciding what stays standing.
2. Choose planting material, if you plant at all — Plant grafted trees if you can get them, because a seedling will not bear in your working life.
3. Water, weeds, fire and mistletoe — A mature shea needs no watering and no feeding. What it needs is grass cleared away, fire kept off, and mistletoe cut out.
4. Flowering and fruit set — Shea flowers in the dry season and drops its fruit in the rains, in the hungriest part of the year.
5. Watch for trouble — Mistletoe, fire and the caterpillar are the three, and one of the three is also food.
6. Gather and harvest the fallen fruit — Collect what has fallen, every day, and never knock fruit off the tree.
7. De-pulp and dry — This is where the price is made. De-pulp the same day and dry the nuts properly, never over smoke.
8. Store the kernels — Store bone dry, off the ground, and check often, because mould here is both a price problem and a safety one.
9. Make butter, and sell — Decide whether to sell kernels or butter, and know what a buyer is actually paying for.

Common Problems & Troubleshooting

If you see: A buyer paying you a low grade price, or rejecting the lot, on nuts that look perfectly clean and dry.

It likely means: The nuts sat in their pulp too long before de-pulping. The fat inside has turned, and that cannot be seen from the outside or reversed afterwards.

Do this: De-pulp the same day you gather, or the next day at the very latest.

If you see: Butter that smells of smoke, or a buyer refusing your nuts after smelling them.

It likely means: The nuts were dried over a fire or in a smoky place. The smell goes right into the fat and cannot be removed.

Do this: Dry nuts in the sun on mats, racks or a clean hard floor, never over a fire.

If you see: Dense clumps of a different-looking leafy plant growing out of the branches high in the crown, with the tree bearing less each year.

It likely means: Mistletoe, a parasite that lives on the tree and takes its water and food. It is the most damaging pest of shea across most of its range.

Do this: Cut out each clump with the branch well below where it is attached, since cutting at the clump lets it grow straight back.

If you see: Fewer bearing trees in the fields each year, stumps where big trees stood, and a falling harvest that nobody can explain by weather.

It likely means: The trees are being cleared or cut for charcoal and firewood. A bearing shea tree took two to five decades to reach that state and will not be replaced in a working life.

Do this: Leave every healthy shea tree standing when clearing a field, and say so plainly to whoever does the clearing.

If you see: Grey or green mould on stored kernels, or a musty smell when a sack is opened.

It likely means: They went into store not quite dry, or the store took in damp. Mould here is a health matter as well as a quality one, which is why buyers test for it.

Do this: Dry until a nut rattles in its shell and cannot be dented with a fingernail before storing anything.

If you see: Branches stripped bare to the leaf stalks during the rains, with large caterpillars feeding on them.

It likely means: The shea caterpillar. It genuinely reduces the nut crop, and in parts of Burkina Faso and its neighbours it is also gathered, dried and sold as a valued food.

Do this: Weigh the two uses honestly rather than reaching automatically for a spray.

If you see: Shea trees planted from seed years ago that have grown well and have never carried a single fruit.

It likely means: They are simply not old enough. Shea from seed takes fifteen to twenty-five years to first bearing and reaches full bearing much later still.

Do this: Expect this and plan around it rather than treating it as failure.

Yield & Market Value

Gathering the crop is only part of the job. The last part is knowing what a normal harvest looks like where you are, and knowing what your kernels or butter are worth before you agree a price with anybody.

Remember It This Way

If you forget every other page of this guide, keep these lines. They are the whole crop, in order, short enough to carry in your head.

You do not plant this crop. You protect it.
Every tree left standing is worth money for a century.
Fire kills the seedlings. Clear the grass before the season.
Cut mistletoe out below where it grips, or it grows back.
Gather only what has fallen. Fallen means ripe.
Go round the trees every day, not every week.
De-pulp the same day. This is where the price is made.
Never dry over smoke. The smell goes into the fat forever.
Dry until the nut rattles in its shell.
Store off the floor, in sacks that breathe, and check often.

Test Yourself: Identification

What does a shea tree look like, and where does it stand?

What does the fruit look like, and which part is the crop?

Who actually does this work, and what does a day's gathering look like?

Honest Limits of This Guide

Timings are given by season rather than in named months, because the shea belt crosses about twenty-one countries and flowering and fruit fall happen at different times across it. Count from your own dry season and your own rains.
Shea statistics are among the weakest of any crop here. Almost all of it is gathered by hand from scattered wild trees and a great deal never enters a formal market, so the yield ranges are broad and uncertain.
Whether quality is paid for depends entirely on who is buying near you. This guide explains what careful handling does and says plainly that the extra care earns nothing where the only buyer pays by weight alone. Find out which situation you are in before the season.
Grafted shea that bears in seven or eight years exists and is named here because it matters, but it is still uncommon across most of the belt. This guide cannot tell you whether it can be had where you are; your extension service or a national research institute can.
This guide names no chemical treatments. The fruit pulp is eaten, the caterpillars are eaten in several countries, and the tree's real threats are fire, clearing and mistletoe, none of which is answered out of a bottle.

Sources

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy species-match record for Vitellaria paradoxa C.F.Gaertn. — Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Copenhagen (source)
EPPO Global Database — Vitellaria paradoxa (EPPO code VILPA) — European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO), Paris (source)
FAOSTAT crops and livestock products, and FAO/ICRAF work on shea parklands in the West African savannah — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome (source)
Vitellaria paradoxa (shea) — CABI Compendium datasheet — CABI, Wallingford (source)

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