Importance of adopting good post-harvest practices
Silos for storing different types of cereals that are managed by a farmers-founded company in Cambridge, UK. Ugandan farmers could use silos for their produce to avoid postharvest losses. Photo By Lominda Afedraru
What you need to know:
Farmers encounter losses of their produce after harvest, but with proper handling, they can avoid this.
Enhancing productivity in food crops is not enough to lift smallholder farmers out of poverty. Farmers must add value to their primary production and also diversify their range of income-earning activities, both on and off the farm. This is only possible if they handle post-harvest practices very well.
Improved post-harvest handling, storage and processing of agricultural produce can lead to increase in income and improved livelihoods of smallholder farmers and agro processors.
Appropriate post-harvest handling, storage and use of new technologies can reduce losses, improve quality and food safety, and enhance smallholder farmers’ food security and income.
Own initiative
This is evident with farmers in the developing countries, especially those in UK who are involved in growing cereal crops such as wheat and barley.
A group of farmers at Cambridge in East Anglia set up a company called Camgrain Stores Ltd, which majored in setting up silos and processing plants for harvested wheat and barley.
After harvest, they bring the grains to Camgrain, where things like stones, grass and dried immature seeds are sorted and what is left and kept in the stores is mature clean grains.
The farmers then take these as bulk to grain millers who pack them for distribution in the various markets and share proceeds.
The technical manager, Mr Allan King, said the farmers started the stores as their own cooperative where they choose the board of directors among themselves.
Different situation
The initial capacity of these silos would accommodate 50,000 tonnes of cleaned grains but now the storage capacity has risen to 150,000 tonnes for wheat alone in one of the company sites.
He said the drying and processing machine is highly mechanised and is capable of drying 250 tonnes of grains per hour.
This initiative by farmers is aimed at producing high quality wheat for food consumed as well as barley for producing good quality beer and spirits.
The farmers have now expanded the stores and processing machines to different parts of England.
Ugandan farmers could learn a lesson from this initiative but Eng Sedrick Mutyaba, head of the postharvest unit at National Agricultural Research Laboratories, Kawanda is of the view that Ugandan farmers are not comparable in post-harvest handling practices to farmers in the developed world.
They have different attitude and value attached to farming in that very few take it as good business venture.
“You find them drying food along roadsides and even where they are drying it on rocks, the place is infiltrated with human faeces and cow dung with animals and chicken moving everywhere,” he said.
Mutyaba added that a farmer spends time to till land, buys seeds and in the end, what he or she harvests is contaminated with stones making it difficult to market the products.
“The history of cooperatives is another nightmare because they collapsed and farmers are now hesitant to harvest, process and bulk the product as a group,” he explained.
However, he advised farmers to adopt some practices which maintain cleanliness, such as avoiding drying on bare ground and rather use polythene sheets.
A priority
Establishing learning platforms to provide training and demonstration for new technologies requires strategic sites where the equipment is housed, demonstrated and maintained. Also, where farmers can come together to learn how to use and benefit from them.
These staging areas can include well-established farmer associations, such as the One Stop Centre Associations in Uganda associated with the Ministry of Agriculture.
Much of the post-harvest handling work is directed toward strengthening the competiveness of commercially-oriented smallholder farmers.
This means grain should be unbroken, un-infested, free of debris, and sufficiently dry to be stored without threat of moulds.
Introduction of improved technology largely mechanised for threshing and shelling, drying and milling is essential.
Reducing postharvest storage losses is a priority for all smallholder farmers, whether they are food-insecure or commercially oriented.
