Editorial Comment: New silo complexes critical for decent storage at affordable costs

The commissioning of the Artificial Intelligence-powered grain silos at the Mutare Grain Marketing Board Depot marks a watershed moment in Zimbabwe’s pursuit of food security and technological advancement.

WITH Zimbabwean farmers now routinely growing surpluses of maize, sorghum, millets and wheat, the need for high-quality storage that is easy to maintain without adding huge maintenance costs to the grain when it is sold becomes ever-more urgent.

Silos and silo complexes have been part of the Grain Marketing Board for more than half a century, stretching into colonial times.

There is a swathe of concrete silo complexes across the north of the Mashonaland provinces, where the largest surpluses were recorded when they were built.

But these are not simple to maintain and it is not easy to check the future quality of loaded grain after packing.

In the nature of ordinary operations in a country largely self-sufficient in grains, a lot of it needs to be stored for up to a year, the gap between harvests.

The summer grains are all largely harvested over a few weeks at the end of summer and the winter wheat and barley, and hopefully the durum wheats now wanted, are harvested in a few weeks at the beginning of summer.

But we are still eating this food as fresh food a year later, and now we are building up reserves we need high quality storage for considerably longer.

The bad drought of last year, the worst in decades, was defeated relatively easily because the GMB carry-over stocks were adequate for the food aid grain rations to hard hit families and the private sector was sufficiently well organised to import the grain needed by the commercial sectors and urban consumers. We were fortunate that there were some accessible stocks for the imports.

The huge reserves created in the middle 1980s tended to rot in their bags under canvas unless very carefully managed at some expense. Severe droughts have shown that it is essential to have carry-over stocks, and preferably have reserves that can last.

That was fine when everything was totally controlled as to producer and consumer prices and subsidies were a normal part of the system, even if that meant it was profitable for farmers to sell maize to the GMB, but buy mealie meal to feed their pigs as they manipulated the subsidies.

Moves towards more market policies, and the need to control costs, meant that the original silo concept needed extensive modification and while no one was advocating abandoning the silo complexes, there was growing expert advice to make sure that when we started investing again in silos we did it better.

This is now being done with the new standard silo complexes that use artificial intelligence to do a lot of the checking of grain qualities and the maintenance of the silos, so slashing the storage costs as humans only become involved when something has to be done, rather than just checked. These complexes mean that the grain is continually monitored and that a fair amount of the routine work on preserving quality can be automated.

The result is not just far lower waste levels, but also far lower storage costs, which is very important if grain has to be stored for two years or even longer.

So far two of the new complexes, each able to handle 56 000 tonnes in its seven silos, have been commissioned, both this year and both by President Mnangagwa at Kwekwe and Mutare.

Another dozen are planned, with complexes opening regularly. The new complexes also bring storage solutions closer to farmers and closer to manufacturers who used to have to arrange transport from Bindura or Concession or some other northern complex.

Once most grain is stored between harvest and being eaten in high-grade conditions, food security and food quality are both enhanced.

While the GMB retains its monopoly for buying Government-contracted grain, these days largely Arda and the surpluses from the Pfumvudza/Intwasa Programme, it remains a buyer of last resort for the self-financed crop and can make joint arrangements with millers and others in the private sector for distribution of inputs, collection of grain and critically storage of grain.

The high-quality and lower cost modern I-powered silos seem highly adaptable by the private sector. The Government and the GMB are not stopping similar private investment and some of the largest milling companies may well want their own silos to store what they buy at harvest time. There are obviously also possibilities of joint ventures.

The upgraded silos with their efficiencies and controllable costs have also sparked the interest of the World Food Programme, which needs regional storage and distribution centres and sees Zimbabwe has having not just the critical central local within Sadc geography, but now also the technologies and the skilled staff to make use of that position.