- Dehydration of Fruits and vegetables plant at Nashik, India – This facility was set up to demonstrate to farmers the advantages of using solar to process and store their produce. Till date, there is very little processing that happens in India and none of it is at the farm level. NRG strongly believes in the following:
i. Bringing newer and renewable technology closer to the people who can really benefit from it.
ii.Secondly, bringing technology to the lower end of the strata, who can possibly earn a decent living if they adopt these technologies.
In India, there is surplus of produce (usually fruits and vegetables) when there is harvesting season, and prices drop dramatically. During this time, the traders in this field force the farmers to sell their produce at alarmingly low prices. These traders often stop any off take from the fields, and the produce is left to rot in the fields itself, and in the end the farmer is forced to sell at whatever price is quoted by the trader. We have been a witness to tones of food rotting in the fields and farmers asking us to take however much we wanted for FREE! That is how pitiable the condition of these farmers is!! And that is when we at NRG decided that, in our own small way, we am going to try and do something for these farmers which could get them out of the clutches of these traders and help them earn a decent living!
Thankfully, since we are in the solar business, we thought, if these people could use solar dryers on their farms itself, they could process the raw produce into dehydrated produce. The shelf life of dehydrated produce is significantly longer (even upto 6 months) and then they would be able to sell it after the harvesting season is over at much better margins (upto 300-500%) than selling it to traders. This way they could get out of the clutches of these traders and also increase their family income considerably.
This demonstration facility was put up in an agricultural hub in India at Nashik, along with University of Mumbai to fulfill the above idea. The dryer is a small 40 sq mtr collector area, with a drying capacity of about 150kgs per day. Various farmers have come forward and taken trial on this dryer and have tried drying onions, tomatoes, ginger, turmeric, grapes, sapotas, tobacco, bitter gourd, snake gourd, mangoes, wheat grass etc.
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