Tumbledown Farm .9 Acres (give or take an acre or two)

Global Cycle Solutions

MIT Effort Pays Off! A Portable, Sustainable, Human-Operated Solution

Web Sites:
http://www.globalcyclesolutions.com/
http://twitter.com/GlobalCycleSoln
http://globalcyclesolutions.blogspot.com/

What a concept! Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) is a social enterprise started at the MIT. The enterprise sells bicycle-pedal-powered devices: for now, corn (maize) shellers, grinders, and battery chargers. GCS aims to help the world’s 550 million small-scale farmers who live on less than $1/day. The devices are intended to be sold to smallholder farmers and rural villagers, especially to micro-entrepreneurs, whose business will be to travel from farm to farm on the bike, offering a mechanical means of processing grain for a modest fee. GCS has developed the interface to allow the bike to power the sheller, grinder, and battery charger. The bicycle returns to being "just a bike" when the device is disengaged.

A pilot project has been conducted in Arusha and the results suggest that micro-entrepreneurs may recoup the cost of the device in less than two weeks. Local microfinance organizations are being involved to help farmers access these products. I look forward to hearing that other devices have been developed. One that interests me particularly is a device for winnowing wheat using the bike. Now that's something even I would buy!
For a sense of the difficulty of hand shelling and hand grinding, take a look at the Tumbledown Farm corn page and wheat page.

I first heard about the new device from an article on Farming First, which I mostly support, though I worry that they are promoting the sort of dependence on industrial ag that now plagues much of the world (e.g., this week was about developments in India that encourage the use of industrial inputs). There are farming solutions that will keep more people profitably employed working on the farm (e.g., the sorts of human-scale, human-powered devices highlighted above). So, why make folks dependent--even for the short term--on industrial seed giants and industrially produced fertilizers?