Interaction with our client "The man in the black jacket "

Hey Guys!

In today's episode we will be giving feedback on our interaction with our community partner.

The  trip we had to our community partner helped us frame the problem he faces in a different light and allowed the members of our group who met with him, four of us, to get deeper understanding of the entire process of groundnut harvesting, with concentration on how they are shelled. We came to understand how scarcity of resources forces farmers to compromise on the yield that they would eventually gather, as well as the shortcomings of current technologies being used in shelling or cracking groundnuts. This led us to better frame the problem that is being faced in the community of farmers we have come in contact with, and moreover has emphasized to us the importance of incorporating the farmers, who are our users, throughout the problem framing and eventually solution and design processes.

From our observations, questions and attempt to immerse ourselves in the environment of the community partner, our responses the following set of questions changed.  Current technologies/solutions exist to address the challenge From our communication with our community partner, we discovered that for many small-scale farmers, this process of decorticating is also known as cracking. For many in these areas, this process is done in three ways. The initial step in all these ways immediately after harvesting is to dry the nuts under the sun to make is easier to separate the shell from the pods.

The most common one and one which provides least damage to the pods is shelling manually using hands. Our community partner explained that for most farmers, this may be done through communal gatherings whereby people, especially children come and shell together. However, this is not conducive with large-scale farming and forces farmers to plant only the number of groundnuts that they can shell quickly before they rot. This process, depending on the amount of people available to assist, and the yield, often takes two days to complete, according to the farmer.

The second process is to place the dry nuts in a basket and hitting the basket repeatedly. This loosens the pods from the shells. However, this also causes considerable damage to the pods. However, it is less time consuming than the hand-shelling. Similarly, according to our community partner, shelling can also be achieved by placing the groundnuts through the rails of a moving motorcycle wheel. As the motorbike is held stationary, the back wheel would be rotating, and the groundnuts would be placed through the rotating metals of the wheel. This process is less labour intensive than the previous two, but it is also highly dangerous and possesses the potential of damaging the pods.

It was noted that currently, there are no mechanized processes by which cracking can be done.

Responses to challenges faced In the community partner’s opinion, challenges in groundnut shelling range from tedious and time-consuming methods involved in manual shelling, as well as economic challenges to kernel damage and incomplete shelling in motorised methods of shelling. From the team’s research, the main challenge faced by the community partner is the unavailability of a technology that can help in effective shelling of groundnut. “The manual shelling of groundnut is a very tedious one and time consuming. It can take up to a day for a small group of people to finish shelling a bag while it may take up to three days for a single person to finish shelling a bag. This means that productivity is very slow. In a situation where a farmer falls sick or a farmer complains of being tired, the implications is that, it would take more days to obtain a bag of shelled groundnut to be available for market consumption,” said the community partner.

They therefore would like to make advancement in the method of groundnut shelling. That is, they would like to move from the manual way of shelling a groundnut to an automated process. Secondly, as a result of continuous hand shelling, the farmers develop sore fingers. Hand shelling is the process in which the pod is pressed between the thumb and first finger so that the kernel is released. According to the farmer, it is the most predominantly used method in rural smallholder groundnut farming. Its energy requirement is high and leads to “sore thumb syndrome” when large quantities are handled. This syndrome can be quite uncomfortable for the labourers and sometimes they are unable to sleep comfortably. 

Thirdly he spoke of the economic challenges farmers such as him face. Shelling of groundnut pods using manual process is characterized by high kernel breakages and low shelling efficiencies. As a result, farmers get low income due to low cost of broken kernels. Also, as stated earlier, it is labour intensive and hence much money is spent paying human labour to shell the groundnut if more bags of groundnut are expected of the farmer by the consumer. More money is also spent on cleaning and preparing groundnuts for further processing. Reflections from our experience Since groundnuts are not in season at the moment, we were unable to partake in some of the ways in which decorticating, or shelling would be done by hand in the context of our community partner. However, since everyone in the group has had first-hand experiences of shelling groundnuts by hand, we could easily empathize with the farmer when he spoke of the pain he experiences in his hands in shelling the groundnuts. Consequently, as the process is very labour intensive it becomes very difficult to shell all the nuts in one sitting especially if they are few people to do it. And in our experiences, we realize that shelling by hand is often done for subsistence yield, and not commercial yield. Therefore, for farmers hoping to shell and make profits from their harvest, an alternative for hand-shelling may be required. 

See you next week!