adminMAIZE is the most important staple food in Zimbabwe and hence its storage – to bridge seasons – is a top and constant priority. The major drive of grain storage is to ensure household food and nutritional security. Impelling grain storage is even more critical at this stage of climate change, where associated weather vagaries adversely affect crop yields. Whatever has been produced must be well managed as research has proved grain storage loss due to moisture, insects, mold, mildew and rodents can cost farmers 25 to 30 percent of their yield for the season.
Most farmers reside in rural areas and resort to unreliable traditional storage practices that hardly protect and guarantee grain safety against major storage pest insects.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions and new technology has been devised to get around all these problems with guaranteed success.
This technology is targeting small-scale farmers who are the hardest hit when grains decay or suffer from rodent attacks, exposing them to middlemen who buy the produce for a song.
The answer lies with the new metal silo technology.
A metal silo is a cylindrical structure constructed from a galvanised sheet with a flat metal top and a flat metal bottom.
A man-hole with a cover, which may be hinged but is nevertheless lockable, is located, usually to one side, in the top panel; and an outlet pipe provided with a padlock is fitted at the base of the wall.
The silo is hermetically sealed – which means it is airtight and kills all insect pests that may be present in the stored grain by oxygen deprivation.
The metal silo technology has its roots in Central America and has been adopted in countries such as Kenya, Malawi and now in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe rolled out a pilot project to promote metal silos to farmers in Shamva and Makoni districts in 2012 and the technology has proven through farmer implementation to give 100 percent grain protection.
Metal silos are used to store grain so it is thoroughly sealed, thereby reducing the amount of grain spoilage by rain and fire exposure and pest penetration.
Metal silos are what the doctor has prescribed for rodents, weevils and the notorious larger grain borer which can eat all the grain and induce loss of up to 100 percent.
The silos are fire proof too and require no additional chemicals.
Grain stored in these silos maintains its original quality for more than eight months.
By providing a reliable means to store grain without loss of quality, the silos provide our farmers with a sure way to control and minimize post-harvest losses.
Before the introduction of these silos, farmers used sacks and matura (the traditional granaries) but were not able to save much.
A traditional granary — a structure built with poles, mud and cow dung — has a major snag in that it allows free entry to the maize weevil, rodents and the larger grain borer, the three most damaging pests of stored maize in the country.
The bagged grain faces risks spoilage by water, termites and damage by rodents.
A farmer has to foot additional costs for chemicals.
As a result of the aforementioned loopholes, pest infestation losses of up to 20 percent are reported three months after storage, and this rises up to more than 50 percent after six months.
The main advantage of a metal silo is that it is airtight, so it keeps out insects and suffocates any that might have stuck in with the stored grain.
Metal silos, though usually considered too expensive for small individual farmers to buy, have been proved useful on small scales in many places.
They are the in-thing and their use is now being encouraged in order to eliminate storage losses as well as enhance food security.
A challenge for small-scale households is the initial costs of a silo, with a five-bag silo going for $75 and a 20-bag silo costing $350.
However, with an effective lifetime of more than two decades, the silos more than pay for themselves, in terms of food security and surplus grain savings.
The silos can be made by local artisans using readily-available materials, take up little space, and enable farmers to store their grain without losses.
The metal silos are durable, lasting between 25 to 30 years and no maintenance is required.
If farmers can store their goods, they can sell them over a longer period of time, reducing the cycles of surplus and scarcity connected to the seasons.
Farmers get higher prices in the off-seasons and so the ability to store their crops would increase their income.
Rather than selling surplus grain straight away, they are able to wait and get a better price for their crop, stabilising supplies and prices of maize while increasing farmers’ food and income security.
Farming is all in vain if farmers cannot store the harvested produce.
Online Reporter