New Sensors to Improve Post-Harvest Grain Quality

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Billions of bushels of grain are put in storage every year. Some of that is on-farm, but the vast majority is at grain elevators where it is eventually shipped to processors to be used for food, feed, and fuel. But along the supply chain the quality can deteriorate resulting in waste, loss, discounts, and even health concerns.

TeleSense is a company that sells a sensor to monitor and react to changes in grain quality in real time.

Zafar… “Once you harvest grain: wheat, corn, canola - it doesn't matter. It never improves in quality. It goes downhill.”

That’s founder and CEO Naeem Zafar.

Zafar… “So the question is, you're going to make dozens of decisions. When to sell it? How long to store it? Should we blend it? What kind of treatment should it get? Fumigation? All these decisions are made with patchy data and intuition. So what we are doing is solving that problem. That if we can provide useful information - insights about your stored grain, you'll be able to improve your profit, reduce your spoilage, improve worker safety, spend less money on operations. So everything is all about improving post-harvest grain profits. That's what we're focused on.”

Zafar and his team have made their sensor easy to install in any grain storage environment, and have built algorithms that provide actionable information.