Detail Publikasi
Abstrak
Agriculture plays an important role in the socio economic status of country because it provides a lot of products like food, biofuel, fibre. However, these products most especially, food is highly threatened by pests hence, farmers have resulted to the use of synthetic pesticides in order to control or manage the adverse effect of pest on crops and stored food produce. These chemical pesticides are both environmentally and humanly unfriending. Therefore, this work seeks to evaluate the use of Neem oil as a bio-pesticide by characterizing the extracted oil. To ensure that the seed used for the extraction was of good quality and ecofriendly, the moisture content (%) and the Ash Content (%) were evaluated. From the result obtained, both quantities were 9.67% and 0.143% for moisture content and Ash content respectively. Further analysis showed that the oil Thin Layer Chromatography analysis yielded 0.7065. This showed that the oil has a high level of azadirachtin, the compound responsible for the insecticide ability of Neem. The water solubility of the oil was 99.93 while the specific gravity, flash point, pH, saponification value, peroxide value, refractive index, acid value and the iodine value were 0.934 g/cm3, 248 , 4.133, 196mgKOH/g, 7(meq/Kg), 1.4567, 14.33(mgKOH/g), and 75.08(mg I2/100 g) respectively. These values were found to be with the range of Neem oil used in the product of bio-pesticides.