You are looking at scripts about Post-harvest activities
Starting a Community Seed Bank: Part 2 – Organizing Workers, Collecting Seed
In Part 1 we explained how a community seed bank can protect rare and local varieties of crops. This script explains how to set up the seed bank. Some farmers put their savings in a bank. When they need extra money, they can take out their savings. This is the way most banks work. A…
Starting a Community Seed Bank: Part 1 – A Good Idea?
A seed bank protects rare and useful local crops. It is also an emergency source of seed if crops fail due to disease, pests, or bad weather. This series of scripts explains why a seed bank is useful and how to set one up. Everyone knows that a bank is where people save their money….
Eat Grain Sprouts for Better Health
Eating grain sprouts improves your diet and stretches your budget at the same time. Like dry grain, grain sprouts, also simply called “sprouts” contain protein, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins A and B. But sprouts also contain vitamin C, which is missing in the dry grain. You need vitamin C to protect yourself against infections and…
Eucalyptus Leaves Control Grain Moth
A Guatemalan farmer uses crushed eucalyptus leaves to control grain moths in stored maize. José Elias is a farmer in Guatemala in Central America. For many years he had a problem with grain moths (Sitotroga cerealella) eating his stored maize. The moths would eat the centre of the kernels and leave the outside part. He…
Save Your Own Seeds Part Two: Seed Storage
Saving your own seeds saves money. It is also the best way to make sure that traditional crop varieties do not disappear. The traditional crops that have grown in your region since before your grandparents’ time are well adapted to the local climate and soil. And they are good at resisting common local pests. But…
Save Your Own Seeds Part One: Seed Selection
Saving seeds from your own crops saves money. And it also helps save the traditional crop varieties which grow in your region. Farmers have always saved seed from their crops to plant the next season. But many farmers now buy seeds from stores in town or directly from seed companies instead. The problem is that…
Neem Protects Stored Grain
Using neem leaves is a simple, no‑cost way to keep insect pests out of the baskets, sacks, bins and pots where you keep your grain. Farmers in India and other places where neem trees grow have been using neem leaves to protect stored grain for centuries. Put a thin layer, about 1 1/2 centimetres, of…
Reining in Rats
Wherever there are people, there are rats, because wherever people live, they store food. Stored food – especially grain – draws rats. But you can stop rats from stealing your food. The first thing to do is to make it difficult for the rats to get at your stored food. The best way to do…
Protect Stored Beans from Weevils
Today we are going to talk about a couple of ways you can prevent bean weevils from damaging stored beans. We will talk about adding ashes or vegetable oil to the beans in storage. The very first step is to determine whether or not it is even necessary to use pest control. In other words,…
Co-Operation Brings New Life to a Village: Case Study #1
Don Doo is a small village of 55 households in northeastern Thailand. It suffered drought for three years. During that time, more than half the households had no rice harvest. The head of the family–sometimes the entire family–had to move from the village to find jobs just to survive. Old people and children were left…