Problem statement

Small-scale Sub-Saharan farmers regularly lose up to 40% of grain harvests as a result of post-harvest losses. These losses primarily result from poor storage environments such as high moisture contents leading to mold growth, contaminants, and pest infestations. Furthermore, the inability to safely store their crops means that farmers are forced to sell them soon after harvesting. This forces them to sell when the supply is at a peak. These issues result from the root problem of high moisture storage environments.

Hypothesis: summary of the solution

<aside> 📋 By adding bags of silica gel (those little bags you find in the seaweed containers) inside of current traditional grain bags, we can absorb the moisture from the grain at a very low cost.

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Target Customer/Audience

There are 600 million people in Africa who are not connected to the electric grid. Our target customers are farmers who live in these rural areas which do not have access to the electric grid to keep their grains from gaining too much moisture. Specifically, African grain farmers who aren't connected to the electric grid.

Solution overview: how it works

• Removing Moisture
• Tracking Moisture
• Re-Usability

Efficacy: Why better than status quo - Ashley

Status quo

There are current African startups working on low-cost sensors to continuously monitor moisture levels in grain storage bags, including GrainMate. However while they have the capability to alert farmers of potential spoilage due to detecting high moisture content in the bags of grain, they don't directly tackle the problem in mitigating the amount of moisture in the air when levels are rising. It is still up to the farmer to devise a plan of action after the alert is sounded.

The improvement with our solution

Our solution tackles the problem head-on: by directly absorbing the moisture from the air. Silica gel has the potential to remove all the moisture in a bag of grain, due to the low-cost of buying the chemical in bulk and putting loads into the packaging, so a monitoring sensor system is not even required to measure the moisture in the bag, which is even more costly. The only aspect which would have to be monitored would be the amount of absorption in the silica gels (more about the colour-changing silica below), to ensure they are being implemented in the packaging storage with the highest degree of efficacy.

Feasibility: How do we know this will work?

• There have been many instances in the past of using silica gel packets in anti-moisture food packaging. In terms of cost, the silica gel is not expensive as it sells for 20 cents a package. Since the colour-changing system is embedded within the silica gel chemical, it does not offer any extra costs.
• The silica gel can absorb 30%-40% of its weight in water, so we know that it is effective enough to absorb sufficient amounts of moisture in the bag.
• It is possible to reuse the bags of silica since by heating the bags you can reset the moisture content in the silica bag, and the colour of the moisture indicator.

FAQ