Agribike Sends Seeds to Spinning Class

June 26, 2009

Just when I thought I'd seen one of the best bike inventions ever--the bicilavadora--another group of students has come up with one that turns agricultural labor into a fun ride.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, drought-resistant sorghum and millet are choice food staples. The problem: threshing the seeds from the stalk or "panicle" is a work-intensive process, requiring women and children to beat the grains with a giant mortar and pestle for hours every day in order to produce just enough to eat. A team of home-schooled high school students from Bridgewater, New Jersey, created a better way.

The Teen Technology Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam--a 501(c)(3)--worked with Jeff Dahlberg, a research director for the National Sorghum Producers to build a simple human-powered threshing machine that beats the stick hands down. The students were inspired by the rotating brushes inside a vacuum cleaner. A stationary bike component rotates a thresher drum, which is dotted with pegs that effectively shear the seeds from the panicle. Air blows through, sending the lighter material up and the heavier seeds down through a chute into a bucket.

Initial results were great: the bike produced 13 kilograms per hour compared to the traditional method's five. And it required far less energy to operate, too. Eleventh-grader David Schmidt told me at EurekaFest that the team is thinking about how the bike, which cost roughly $100 to build, could be made from indigenous materials. "You don't need [these] pedals," he says. "You could use wood."

Here's a short video I shot that shows it in action:

Photo: Pedals Pass the Pestle. Credit: Alyssa Danigelis.

Comments

[Diana Zapalac]

This ingenuity and caring that went into the creation of this machine brought tears to my eyes.
Thank You to those young adults and to the Alyssa for sharing it with the rest of us.

[Alyssa]

Thank you so much for the feedback Diana!