Solutions to your grain storage with techno-serve.

Over the years, Zambian small scale farmers have struggled with post harvest storage equipment. While many small scale farmers are trying to fulfill the increasing food demand and make a profit out of it, about one-third of their post harvest is lost or wasted due to poor storage facilities.

However, techno-serve has introduced post harvest technological equipment that will help farmers across the country properly store their post harvest produce for a long run without having any challenges of pastes and diseases which have been the major problem when it comes to storage.

During the launch of the post harvest technologies, Mr. Alick Daka spoke about the farmers having to incur ‘zero waste’ as these storage equipment’s will help in safe keeping their post harvest for a very long time as they are durable and easy to maintain.

“This multi-dimensional approach aimed at accelerating technologies in market developments will undoubtedly contribute to the reduction in crop loses experienced mostly by our small holder farmers” said Deputy Director, under the crop department from the ministry on agriculture, Mr. Alick Daka.

Postharvest technologies focus on moving farmer’s interest from the old tradition always of storing grain to the new and advanced methods that small scale farmers will use to preserve their grain after harvest. Hence, the focus area has been around storing grain due to various pastes, rodents and other threats that have affected the grain which, farmers do not account for in their post harvest.

Nonetheless, there are other kinds of storage facilities that small scale farmers may use such as actelique chemicals which to an extent, become difficult for farmers simply because the chemical needs a certain period of time to ware-off in-order for a farmer to be able to consume that grain when in need. However, even after applying the chemicals, there are still some loses that farmers may incur as it goes not guarantee 100% protection over all grain in storage.

“Using the chemicals might become expensive hence post harvest technologies are aimed at reducing these extra costs and a farmer will begin to use what is known as hematic storage which means that, there is no oxygen getting into the container hence leaving no room for growing pastes that can harm the farmers grain.” Said Techno-serves Senior Business adviser, Mrs. Samantha Chikonka

With this type of technologies, it has been noted that farmers do not have the need to buy pesticides.

Speaking about other advantages that these storage equipment have, she stated that they are durable as they can last between 3-5 years. When it comes to sizes, they have a 50kg bag (smallest bag) to the 100 kg bag (the biggest bag). They also have grain cylo’s which are 3000 liters with the capacity of 2500kg of grain storage with duration of about 15-30 years.  

“In the next 5 years, we are hoping and trying to focus on other storage facilities such as tomato’s and other farmers produce but for now, our focus will be on storage of grain such as ground nuts, maize gain etc.” she concluded.

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