India is primarily an agrarian nation where close to 60% of the rural working population engages in agriculture. Farmers in India, like in many other developing nations, have small land holdings and depend to a large extent on credit and bank loans to support their farming operation. Financial risk is perhaps the biggest risk that this farmer undertakes. A few years of bad crop or lousy prices could essentially sink the farmer.
Immature supply chain management adds to the burden of food safety and has turned India into a major contributor of food wastage both at pre and post harvest phases
India has the highest, ever increasing grain spoilage in a comparatively easier to manage wheat and rice supply chain. The scale of waste is staggering. A quick glance at the stock of rice and wheat held in central pool from 2005 on wards reveals how the stocks have swelled. But in tandem with the rising stocks, the waste has gone up drastically.
61 million USD is the value of food grains wasted in India every year. What’s more, the food grain wastage value is 150 per cent of India’s budget allocation on agriculture also every year we spend millions of rupees out of public exchequer for preventing decay—but to no avail—and then spend a fortune again to dispose of the piled up waste.
It is estimated that that over $1 billion is lost worldwide each year due to grain spoilage.
The idea is to build a Solar Powered IoT based Grain Storage Monitoring and Spoilage Control System for the existing food grain go-downs or central storage pools.
The system has the following features:
- Set required temperature and air flow condition inside the go-down by monitoring the local weather data.
- Ward off external moisture and pests and rodents.
- Monitor the health of food grain by monitoring temperature, CO2 emission and humidity from the stored grain.
- Prevent theft and spillage by camera inspection.
- Identify and locate each sack. (Sacks will be provided ACTIVE RFID COIN TAGs).
- Gives the farmers an opportunity to keep track of their products and monitor the health of their products till it reaches the customer via their mobile app.
- Via a mobile application the farmers can sell their products which are stored in the central pool directly to the local market and get a better price.
- With all the data regarding a central pool available in the cloud/server we can bring transparency in the food grain storage and distribution supply chain.
- With enough stock farmers can practice crop rotation and cultivate seasonal crops and generate revenue.
- Mobile App can create a closed farming community in which farmers can share their farming techniques, seeds, fertilizers and tools.
Though I admit that winding the loss of grains to zero is nearly impractical, but improving our storage practices can yield in massive savings and improve lives of farmers.
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