Our Products
There is growing international demand for high quality, fair trade products derived from aromatic plants, such as essential oils, particularly in Europe, Asia, and North America. Zimbabwe has optimal climatic conditions for the organic production of herbs, spices, medicinal, and aromatic plants. Our range of products includes herbs, spices, essential oils, and aromas from biodynamic crops, such as dill, thyme, lemon grass, eucalyptus, jasmine, lavender, peppermint, rose, bitter orange, and tea tree. We also cultivate organic vegetables and staple crops.
On account of their aroma and highly volatile nature, essential oils have been traditionally used as basic raw leadership (http://www.silveira.co.zw/) and Kufunda, a learning village (http://www.kufunda.org/). We cultivate a variety of plants on the premises of Silveira House and at the Kufunda centres. Together, we organise training courses for partner farmers.
This training helps partner farmers to achieve organic certification in accordance with the strict standards of international organic bodies. At the same time, KAITE’s research unit does the following: it prepares experimental gardens; acquires seeds/plants; propagates seedlings/cuttings; plants gardens; cultures plants on the demonstration field; studies growth habits; maintains the history of individual plants; harvests, steams and distils plants; records yields and conducts chemical analyses on promising oils; and replicates experiments, so that the correct cultivation regimes may be established. 
At harvest time, the plants are distilled using commercial or pilot scale equipment, rather than laboratory equipment, so that accurate yields per unit area can be obtained. Essential oils may be derived from plants through the following processes: hydro distillation (water distillation), a process in which water and the plant material are boiled together in a common tub, and steam distillation using dry steam to vaporize and extract the oil.
As soon as the oil has been produced, it is circulated to user companies, in order for trade acceptability to be assessed. Once the crop has moved from the research phase into the maintenance and improvement stage, we work together with our partners to improve processing methods, oil yields, and oil quality.
