Improving Cereal Storage Facilities with Gas Sensing

Storage of cereal crops and other foodstuffs is an essential part of ensuring a sustainable and robust food supply.

Cereal crops are typically harvested between mid-July to mid-September but with careful storage can be kept for periods longer than a year. Successful storage of cereals involves the balance of a variety of environmental conditions to ensure the maintenance of quality and the original properties of the grain, including weight and appearance. Ideally, stored grain should be able to match freshly harvested grains in terms of nutrition and appeal.

Poor quality storage not just threatens global food security, a growing concern in a world with expanding populations and energy demands, but also comes with a significant financial cost. Mazie crops lost to poor storage conditions account for $500 million to $1 billion of lost revenue for the developing world alone.

These are strong motivations to find reliable methods for the monitoring and optimizing of environmental conditions for grain storage. Common reasons for spoilage of stored cereals include water and humidity damage, invasion by insects or microorganisms, or even decomposition. Common approaches to kill invasive species were to fumigate storage silos with toxic chemicals but this only addresses the issue of damage by organisms and has become generally less popular with time due to concerns about the safety of using such chemicals on foodstuffs. However, it has been found that by using modified atmospheric conditions that, not only can temperature and humidity damage be minimized, but the decomposition rate slowed and even the growth rates of microorganisms minimized.

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