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Ghana Peanut Growers Take a Crack at Shelling Device
FrontLines - December-January 2009-10
By Natalie Hampton
HIAWOANWU,
Ghana—In this village
near Ejura, peanut
growers have seen
their yields double and
triple in recent years,
but they couldn’t keep
up with all the nuts
that needed to be
shelled by hand.
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Jock Brandis, center, and technicians
from Kumasi's Crops Research Institute
demonstrate groundnut and shea nut
shellers.
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Now, however, the
growers can increase
processing from 1
kilogram per hour
to 50 kilograms per
hour since they have
access to simple, handcranked
shellers made
of concrete and a few
moveable parts to shell
their peanuts—also
known as groundnuts.
The improvement in crop
yields came about through
the USAID-funded Peanut
Cooperative Research and
Support Program (CRSP) at
North Carolina State University
and Ghana’s Crops Research
Institute (CRI). The CRSP joined
forces with the Full Belly Project,
a North Carolina NGO, to introduce
the shellers in Ghana.
The Full Belly Project creates
simple machines to solve agricultural
problems in developing
countries, then provides kits and
education to build and repair the
machines. Rick Brandenburg,
an entomologist from the Peanut
CRSP, asked the project founder
Jock Brandis to help with the
shellers in Ghana after learning of
similar project efforts in Malawi.
Brandis spent a week at CRI
in Kumasi, training technicians
to cast the concrete base of the
shellers and to install hand cranks
and other moveable parts made
from local materials so growers
won’t depend on overseas parts.
Before an audience of agriculture,
development, and government
officials, Brandis and the
technicians demonstrated the
groundnut sheller as well as a shea
nut sheller and a simple foot-operated
pump for watering a garden.
While one person can
hand-shell about 1 kilogram
of groundnuts in an hour, Full
Belly’s machine sheller can
handle 50 kilograms in the same
period—with less than 5 percent
breakage. Some commercial
shellers break 20 percent of nuts.
But the true test of the shellers
came during demonstrations
for growers in the villages like
Hiawoanwu—whose name
means “poverty doesn’t kill
you.” At each site, growers were
eager to try their hand cranking
the sheller, as hulls and groundnuts
fell into a bowl below.
Yaa Adu, 45, a groundnut
grower in Hiawoanwu, said the
sheller would help her reduce
fatigue from hand shelling groundnuts,
and provide an economic
boost, especially when the market
price for groundnuts is high.
Janet Serwaah, 46, a grower
who tried the groundnut sheller
during the demonstration, said
she had wanted to expand
her groundnut operation, but
couldn’t handle a larger crop
yield using hand shelling. With
the sheller, she said, expansion
is now an option for her.
“These shellers will encourage
other growers to produce
groundnuts because they are
such simple tools,” said Mike
Owusu-Akyaw, who works
in pest management for CRI.
“Everywhere we went to demonstrate
the sheller, the growers
wanted us to leave the machine
with them.”
USAID’s Peanut CRSP, which
has worked in Ghana since 1996,
provided some funding for the
peanut shellers, while CRI provided
facilities and personnel to
construct the shellers. .
★
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by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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