Humanitarian Engineering: Central American Bean Threshing Project
People living in Central America, specifically Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, suffer from severe malnutrition. In Guatemala, 23% of children under five are underweight, and 50% of children under 5 are stunted. 80% of people living in the North, Southwest, and Northwest regions suffer from chronic malnutrition. These problems mostly stem from a food shortage because this region lacks the resources and technology required for an agricultural revolution.
Beans are one of the major staple goods of this area and many people are dependent on this crop. The problem with this crop is that when the beans are ripe, they need to be dried and threshed. Threshing is defined by any method that removes the bean from the pod. The current method of threshing is to take an iron rebar and whacking a pile of dried beans until the beans pop out of the pods. This is physically demanding and very inefficient. The farmers are limited to how many beans they can grow by the number of beans they can thresh in a season.
Currently, I am working to design and build a device that will mechanize this process. The challenge of creating this thresher is that the area lacks electricity and the know-how to maintain an internal combustion engine. Thus, a simple human powered device is required. Also, being a very mountainous region, the device has to be easily transported, meaning it has to be small and light weight. Threshers have been introduced to the area before, but failed because the device was too heavy and broke down frequently. My device must overcome these obstacles.
The device will be a two (wo)man operation, one person will ride a bike that powers the device, while the other person feeds bean plants into the device. The other end of the device will output threshed beans, free of plant particulates. If this device can speed up the threshing by 200%, then the farmers can subsequently grow 200% more beans, providing their country with 2 times more beans. Also, since the operation will be mechanized, this process will be less physically demanding and prevent any long term damage to the human body. The goal with this project is to provide the technology needed to throw Central America into an agricultural revolution that will drive the area out of poverty and starvation.
Hopefully 8 weeks from now, I will have a device built that will meet this goal.