Four engineering students at MIT had the opportunity to show off their ideas for improving food production in India during the recent MIT Water and Food Security Student Symposium.

These engineers tackled some of the biggest problems for rural farmers in India, including water pumps and extending crop life.

Solar Irrigation for Year-Round Farming

Kevin Patrick Simon, a mechanical engineering PhD candidate, has developed a plan to help farmers use solar irrigation to cultivate crops year-round. Currently, many farmers use diesel to run their water pumps due to unreliable energy supply. This means many farmers can only afford to irrigate their land for a few months each year. Simon expects his development to help these farmers work their land all year.

“It gives small farmers an unprecedented amount of independence and an ability to draw income from their land,” Simon said.

Improving Irrigation Water Supplies

Pulkit Shamshery, who also studies mechanical engineering, has been focusing on improving the water supply for small farmers, as well.

“There is an extreme need for more food with less water, and that’s the motivation for drip irrigation,” said Shamshery.

Shamshery found that drip irrigation can be expensive and has been looking at ways to reduce the cost. One of the problems he has tried to tackle is the loss of pressure in the irrigation systems when they are used to get water from surface sources. He has developed a device to reduce the pressure loss, which has the ability to cut pressure loss by about 50 per cent per acre.

Quality Control in the Milk Supply Chain

The milk industry in India has been failing, and Pranay Jain has come up with a way to tackle contamination concerns many have with the product.

“In the United States, you can buy milk off the shelf and not worry about any contamination, but that’s not true for developing countries,” said Jain, another mechanical engineering PhD candidate.

Jain has created a portable tool that can test the quality of milk. The device is powered by mobile phones and can collect data onto the cloud, where researchers will be able to access it and monitor the milk supply.

The inspiration behind the design is helping those involved in the milk industry to ensure the quality of their product and to garner trust in that quality between both sides - the supplier and the processing plant.

“The supply chain simplifies,” Jain said. “More farmers opt to sell their milk to processing plants, these plants can get more milk, they will pay the farmer more accurately and both sides benefit.”

CoolCrop Storage to Reduce Produce Spoilage

Another product on display at the Symposium and already in use is CoolCrop, a storage unit for farmers.

Designed by electrical engineering and computer science PhD candidate Kendall Nowocin, it looks to solve the problem of crop loss due to spoilage.

NGOs are already using CoolCrop to help farmers preserve the life of their products.

It also gives farmers data on which markets they can get the most money from, allowing farmers to “extract an initial profit that pays for the cold storage and increases the value for the farmer,” Nowocin said. 

The event was hosted by the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) in November. Each of the student presenters gave a five minute presentation offering an overview of their research project and how they sought to solve environmental threats to food and water security.

For more information, visit the MIT School of Engineering.