Why I invented flour mill technology for developing countries

Peter Dyk is an Austrian compact milling system inventor. He partners Odejad Agro Ltd in Nigeria to get flour milling technology that fits the average Nigerian farmers and processors. caught up with him during the just concluded International Wheat Conference yesterday in Abuja. Excerpts:

enough educative workers and managers to manage these mills and they start to have problems. These mills with very expensive equipment ruin in ten years. In some countries every ten years there was a mill building and they ruin it, the next step they will even build a bigger one, with same mistake and after 20 years it was broken and they start building again.

I said this is not the right thing for a developing country. I had to think on a solution on how we can make small flour mills with the same research as industrial mills-the same brightness of the flour, the same quality and of course the baking quality.

We did a lot of research about 15 to 20 years ago and we have the experience to produce flour mills that are already made in certified containers frames ready for startup, we only need to plug the electricity and feed the grains in it and get flour out.

How effective are these machines in terms of output, power consumption and some of the weaknesses you see in the industrial mills?

In the conventional industrial mills, they have a lot of milling steps to produce white flour-some of them have 15 steps- very complicated systems and it is very expensive, this is done so long. In our milling system, this is done in just three steps. This is the reason why it is so easy to put such a milling system we have with capacity for one tonne per hour. This can be done in a month; we can train people to run our mills perfectly.

Electricity in a huge flour mill is a big problem. You see in industrial scale flour milling system, once the machine stops, to get it running again, it takes hours because of the many steps. I have seen this in many countries. In our system, because it has only three steps, when the power stops and the mill stops, we have a switch and in five minutes, it will be running smoothly again. This is very simple and very effective. Our mills fit the developing countries’ food safety programmes.

What crops do the machine mill?

In our system, we can mostly mill wheat but also maize and sorghum.

What about the costs-how affordable?

We can save cost in building because in a conventional industrial mill, multi storey building is necessary because of the various steps involved. You need large space too. But our machines are already mounted in containers and you only need space to put it, then holes around these containers and the electricityand that’s it.

What about the durability of these machines?

It lasts for more than 20 years. We have one running in Tanzania for about 18 years now.

What parts? about the spare

We are building machines that are not complicated and the parts are easily accessible through our partners.

Within two hours we can change the spare parts for the mills.

These mills can be erected in rural areas of wheat production, bread production.

What is your production capacity?

We have the capacity to produce 10 to 15 mills per year. This is not the biggest problem, but the biggest problem is the funding.