RASP®
Reduced Agricultural Spoilage Program
In today’s world of growing populations and food needs, we are revisiting, with respect to agriculture, the old adage -
"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day;
teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."
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However, too often in the developing world, we are letting the newly-educated man down by not providing him with infrastructure needed to save, sell, or transport what he grows.
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India, Africa, Latin America and other developing regions continue to face crippling hunger and poverty rates. Despite the consistent production of agricultural products, the post-harvest loss rate for fruits and vegetables hovers around 40% and has remained there for years, undermining the ability of local farmers to feed their countrymen and develop exports. The total spoilage of post-harvest loss hovers around 1.3 billion tons.
Some important facts and figures:
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In India only 2% of products are temperature controlled
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Post-harvest losses cost China at least $6 billion per year and Pakistan $1 billion
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In Panama post-harvest losses approach 60 %
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In Sub-Saharan Africa, post-harvest losses of horticultural crops range from 30 percent to an astonishing 80 percent.
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To address this world-wide problem of spoilage and to improve the potential for developing countries to feed their populations, Nenko Advisors International, LLC has developed a concept unique in concept and implementation: RASP®.
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What is RASP®?
RASP® is an off-the-grid, alternative energy, agricultural cold storage facility aimed at preventing post-harvest loss of fruits and vegetables worldwide. With RASP®, we combine the latest in cold storage manufacturing technology and control with a specially designed PV solar power as the energy source. Using electronically integrated systems, combined with proprietary control units, RASP® produces a cold storage product potentially capable of dramatically reducing the loss of fruits and vegetables in the developing economies of the world.
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The RASP® cold room can be located at any point in the supply chain, from the farm, to the village, to the export center. The current service life of this power system is projected to be 25 years.
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The RASP® cold room is planned to be 24 ft x 10 ft x 8 ft. but adjustable to meet the needs of each geographical area and can become part of a complete hub and spoke distribution and storage system.
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The entire system, which includes the solar power arrays, battery storage banks, control units and cold room, can be easily assembled in a matter of days by a small team of semi-skilled workers managed by our trained installation managers. The amount of crops that can be stored in each RASP® unit is estimated at a minimum of 10 metric tons, with scalability to larger capacities possible and anticipated.
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Why RASP®?
RASP® supplies the missing link in the cold chain with ease of deployment, cost effectiveness, ease of operation, low maintenance, scalability and the ability to be remotely controlled and monitored. It also has the potential to allow farmers globally to maximize their crop production by utilizing all of the land that they have available to plant.
RASP® will allow farmers to harvest crops when they are at the right time to be harvested and therefore maximizing the potential for income. In many cases our research shows that crops are picked when the “middle man” is coming not when the farmer should. When fully deployed, RASP® should dramatically increase the amount of cold storage available worldwide and can play a key role in solving the puzzle of reducing world-wide crop spoilage.