UIUC Helps Eliminate Brazilian Postharvest Corn and Soybean Waste

Grace Danao and Rich Gates are the lead investigators studying transportation and storage losses. “Traditionally, soybean and corn production was in southern Brazil, and everything was exported from ports in the south,” said Danao. “In the last 20 years, production has moved north, and transportation has become an issue.”

Only 10 percent of the country’s road network is paved, and more than 60 percent of agricultural production is transported by truck. “Losses during these long hauls have not been well documented,” said Danao, “and it will be interesting to see if we can correlate particular segments of these roads [and their conditions] to losses, or if losses occur because the trucks are filled over their capacity.”

Danao said they are working on using an instrumentation system that monitors temperature, moisture, air flow and carbon dioxide buildup in grain in trucks during transportation. “We want to measure not only quantity losses, but quality losses as well. We want to measure the nutritive quality of grain used for animal feed and how those properties change over time.”

Danao said they are also studying the most common storage system used in Brazil, commercial elevators called graneleiros. Graneleiros are flat storages about 100 meters long and 50 meters wide, with a large V-shaped bottom made of concrete. Aeration is difficult to engineer and operate efficiently. The proper sizing of fans and ducts, and placement of ducts, must be practiced to maintain consistent air flow throughout the bed of grains.

“As production has increased, they have had to scale up their storage facilities,” Danao continued. “We would like to assess the basic graneleiro and design, evaluate how current practices in filling and managing deep silos and graneleiros contribute to kernel damage, and compare air-flow measurements to designed air flow and assess adequacy and efficiency of aeration operations.”

The third component of the study is designing, testing, and analyzing the costs of alternate structures for on-farm storage, said Danao. “Only 17 percent of the small farms have adequate grain storage. In Argentina and Paraguay, silo bags have been found to be a great temporary on-farm storage option. In Brazil, many farmers leave their corn in the field to dry, but they still don’t have a way to store it. Silo bags may offer a temporary storage solution that allows the farmers to hedge and sell their corn at a higher price.”

Danao said they also hope to partner with a facility such as a beef cattle operation. “They need to store a lot of grain for their feed mill,” she said. “A side-by-side study of storing corn in a silo bag or in a structure allows us to compare to see if the quantity and quality of the nutrients and grain is different.”

The entire project is ongoing, and Danao said the team hopes to be able to demonstrate low-cost and efficient strategies that can be adopted by small and large producers in the next three to five years.