For horticulture farmers, increasing the shelf life of the perishable produce will result in getting better price and wider market area. India is the second largest producer of horticulture crops after China.
However, of the estimated 296 million tonnes of horticulture crops, 47 million tonnes account for potato, and in spite of having a good shelf life, a lion’s share of cold storage is used by it. There are hardly any cold storages for other crops such as leafy vegetables, flowers, cherries, cabbage, strawberries or capsicum, that have very small shelf life.
“With farmers in an area generally growing one crop, it is abundantly available but since he has no access to cold storage, he can neither send it to a distant place for a better price nor stock it,” explains Devendra Gupta, CEO of Pune-based Ecozen Solutions Private Limited.
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But if he can pre-cool it and extend its life and send to a longer distance extending the market, he will get a better price, he points out.
Mr. Gupta, a graduate of IIT, Kharagpur, co-founded the company based in Pune with fellow IITians Prateek Singhal and Vivek Pandey. They developed a portable solar pre-cooling unit backed up by thermal storage and integrated with digital technology.
In contrast to cold chain set up for a commodity that cannot be used once the season is over, they can be used for multiple crops, he says.
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“The cold room can be used by using a mobile app and selecting a crop. Automatically programme data goes to an online platform. And we give the information to the buyer too,” Mr. Gupta told The Hindu on the sidelines of the AgriTech 2017 Summit here.
The cold room is a 20-foot container with five tonnes capacity that runs on solar power and uses thermal storage technology.
It is kept at one place for a few months and once the farmers exhaust its use, it is shifted to another place, explains Mr. Gupta. The units are remotely monitored to ensure smooth functioning.
He has been running the company since he graduated in 2010. Now 70 cold rooms are in use in Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Haryana and Telangana. Some units have been exported. In Telangana, it is being used for roses, tomato, coloured capsicum and coronations. By maintaining the required temperature, the life of rose can be extended up to 24 days, he says.
Each of the cold room costs ₹15 lakh inclusive of five-year maintenance, installation, commissioning and GST, and comes with government subsidy under the Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture.
Some of the units are being used by multiple farmers, some by travel companies and some even by single farmers, he says.
The company visits various exhibitions to reach out to farmers and has Raya Solars as channel partners in Andhra Pradesh.