CTI |Bountifield recently collaborated with The Soybean Innovation Lab working to train our local manufacturing partner, C to C Engineering, on fabricating SIL’s multi-crop thresher, originally developed in Ghana. The SIL thresher is designed to be low cost, produced locally, and can be used by farmers to shell maize and thresh soybean, rice, legumes, sorghum and other crops. With SIL’s design, farmers can process soybean 40 percent faster with almost no loss compared to other larger and more expensive options. In the coming months, CTI|Bountifield will be working to adapt the thresher to fit the needs of farmers in Malawi to bring their crops to market.
The four day hands-on training in early December brought together engineers from across Africa. C-to-C in Malawi fabricated SIL’s original design with the assistance of Imoro Donmuah Sufiyanu, the original designer and manufacturer of the thresher from Ghana and Jeffrey Boakye Appiagyei, an engineer with SAYeTECH and AgriCad Africa.
The fabrication workshop team also included CTI|Bountifield’s US based technology coordinator Bridget Gerenz, who will be overseeing the next phase of the project led by CTI|Bountifield to adapt the thresher to work best for Malawian farmers. With a now completed and locally built thresher, CTI|Bountifield’s team will bring the machine into the field to be used by farmers around Malawi with a variety of crops including maize, peanuts, and soybean.
After initial testing and research using the thresher locally, we will explore how the thresher’s design can be modified so it can be used throughout the country with local varieties of the crops (particularly peanuts, a valuable crop widely grown in Malawi) and potentially be adapted to be pedal powered. Finally, the modified thresher will be used to test market conditions for target crops in the spring of 2019. CTI|Bountifield will be researching to ensure that farmers will see a return on investment from buying and using the CTI|Bountifield-modified thresher to process their crops to be sold at the market.This fabrication and pilot study of the thresher in Malawi is supported through a generous grant from the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss and ADM Cares.