Department of Agriculture’s Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PhilMech) is looking into interventions for non-functioning flatbed dryers (FBDs) nationwide so these units can be tapped to help minimize crop losses.
“We’re evaluating the FBD to identify proper interventions for each,” PhilMech deputy executive director Arnel Ramir Apaga said Friday on the side of a briefing in Metro Manila.
He said such interventions can include either financial or technical assistance for work needed on the FBDs.
“If farmers groups given the FBDs merely left these lying idle, we can relocate the units where needed,” he also said.
Apaga said DA-PhilMech promoted the use of FBDs since they were the most adaptable to needs of local farmers.
Aside from being simple to construct and operate, FBDs require low maintenance and operating cost, dry dripping wet palay to the required 14 percent moisture content in 10 to 12 hours, can be disassembled and re-assembled where and when needed and can accommodate different varieties of a crop.
“FBDs are also multi-commodity dryers,” he said, citing rice, corn, cassava and even seaweeds as among produce which the facilities can dry.
DA-PhilMech distributed a total of 2,189 FBDs nationwide from 2007 to 2010, so farmers’ cooperatives and irrigators’ associations can have facilities for drying respective crops even during rainy weather.
The agency distributed such FBDs in Cordillera Administrative Region as well as regions 1, 2, 3, 4-A, 4-B, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Nearly 94 percent of FBDs distributed are functioning, PhilMech said.
DA-PhilMech credited this to efforts of FBD recipients concerned on maintaining the dryers.
Various problems plague the non-functioning FBDs such as missing or stolen components.[PNA]
