Real Storage Science, Global
Post-Harvest Loss Prevention is about the part of farming where the crop is already grown and the money is still lost: storage. A third of what a smallholder harvests can disappear between the field and the sale, and almost none of it is dramatic.
It is a searchable library of real storage science, organised by what is being stored — cereal grain, legume, root and tuber, fruit and vegetable, cash crop — covering safe moisture content by crop, the pests that find each one, and the storage technologies that actually work at a smallholder's scale.
Aflatoxin gets its own treatment because it is the risk most likely to be underestimated. Aspergillus flavus grows on damp cereals, legumes and nuts, it is invisible, it is not cooked out, and it is the reason a buyer rejects a load or a family gets ill from grain that looked fine.
It covers low-cost options seriously — hermetic storage such as PICS bags, which control pests without chemicals and cost very little — rather than assuming a farmer has a temperature-controlled store.
Reports export as Word or PowerPoint, which sounds odd for a farmer and is not: the people who most often need this are extension officers, cooperative managers and FPO staff who have to present it to a room.
It is free to browse and needs no farm profile. Somebody deciding whether their storage is adequate should not have to register to find out that it is not.
What it is. A crop-by-crop library of how to keep a harvest rather than lose it: drying and storage practice, aflatoxin risk, and real low-cost storage technologies — including hermetic storage, which works without chemicals — drawn from verified references and exportable as a document.
When to open it. Before the harvest, not after. Almost every post-harvest loss is decided in the first fortnight, by how the crop was dried and what it went into.
Have ready.
Step by step.
What it will not do. It is guidance, referenced and general. It cannot see your store, does not know your local pest pressure or humidity, and does not test for aflatoxin — that needs a laboratory. Where national regulations govern storage chemicals, those regulations decide, not this.
Maize harvested in a wet season, going into store for four months.
What goes in:
What comes out:
The single most useful fact on the page is that aflatoxin is invisible. Farmers routinely judge a stored crop by looking at it, and this is the one risk where looking tells you nothing — which is why the guidance is entirely about preventing the conditions rather than about inspecting the result.
Hermetic storage — an airtight bag or container. The insects consume the oxygen inside and die; the grain is unharmed and no chemical touches food anybody will eat. It is one of the cheapest and most effective post-harvest technologies available and remains badly under-used. It only works if the container is genuinely sealed and stays sealed.
A toxin produced by moulds that grow on crops — groundnut and maize above all — under warm, damp conditions, in the field and in store. It cannot be seen, smelled or tasted, is not destroyed by cooking, and is a serious health risk. You avoid it by preventing the conditions: harvest at the right time, dry quickly to a safe moisture, never dry on bare soil, and store dry and sealed. Once it is in the crop, nothing you can do at home removes it.
Dry enough that mould cannot grow, which depends on the crop, the storage temperature and how long you intend to store it — the guidance for your crop gives the figure. What holds everywhere is that the days right after harvest decide it, that a crop put away wet does not dry in the bag, and that no later intervention recovers what wet storage costs you.
It takes moisture back from the soil overnight, undoing the day's drying; it collects stones, soil and animal contamination; and for groundnut and maize the soil contact is directly implicated in aflatoxin risk. A tarpaulin, a mat or a raised platform costs very little against what it prevents.
Enough that it is often the cheapest yield increase available to a smallholder — improving storage costs a fraction of what raising field yield by the same amount would. That is the argument of this whole section: the crop is already grown and already paid for, and keeping it is the least expensive tonne you will ever gain.
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