A graduate of the University of the Philippines in Los Baños has devised a simple and affordable solution to help poor rice and corn farmers substantially reduce pest damage on their crops while in storage.
Josine Macaspac, a 27-year-old entomologist, says post-harvest losses from pests amount to millions of pesos in damaged produce and lost revenues a year.
This is especially true for small farmers who continue to use traditional storage methods for their grains because they do not have the capital to buy modern storage facilities.
Macaspac says the main motivation for the project is to provide rural, small-scale farmers an effective, affordable and environmental-friendly way to control post-harvest and storage pests.
“If you’ve ever experienced insects in your stored dry food items, you would know how much damage they can cause. This is a simple machine that can help farmers reduce that damage. Imagine a machine remove all those pesky bugs, leaving behind clean and pure produce,” Macaspac says.
At the heart of the system is a vibration machine called the MPReS or the Mechanical Pest Removal System. It cleans the produce by separating the pests from the grains. Once they are removed from the grains, the pests are ejected out through holes at the bottom of the machine. The whole process will only take 5 to 8 minutes from start to finish, and a farmer can clean 600 kilos of produce in an hour.
Effectively, the system can clean 12 sacks of produce in a single hour without the use of electricity or expensive fuel.
This makes the MPReS functionally more effective even in far-flung farms where electricity and fuel may be scarce, Macaspac says.
The system is especially effective on crops infested by such pests as rice weevils, lesser grain borers and red rust flour beetles, Macaspac says. These are the three major grain pests attacking crops in the country, she says.
MPReS is Macaspac’ entry in the Youth Agripreneurs Project competition sponsored by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research every year. GFAR is a body that is committed to making agriculture more relevant and modern through agri-research and innovation. The competition will sponsor 10 winners from around the globe by providing a $5,000 project grant to use as seed money for various agricultural projects.
Macaspac is a partner in Dream Agritech, an agricultural consultancy company owned by young graduates of UPLB engaged in providing new technologies in agriculture and the environment to help the country’s farmers, among others, improve crop production.