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India – For Indian farmer Lalmuankimi Bawitlung, selling her annual orange harvest is often a race against time to beat the heat.
The 38-year-old, who owns a small plot in her village in northeastern India, threw away about a third of her 350 kg (772 pound) crop last year because the fruit became overripe or rotten, and could not be sold.
“I have always been in a hurry to dispose of my oranges at whatever price available, to prevent as much wastage as possible … (with) the increasing heat making it worse,” she said at her home in Kawnzar village in the state of Mizoram.
But Lalmuankimi’s prospects are brighter since the state government in January installed a 10-tonne solar-powered cold storage unit for farm produce in the nearby village of Khawzawl.
The facility uses ice battery technology, or thermal energy storage, to convert water into ice within six hours using solar.
The Mizoram Science, Technology & Innovation Council (MISTIC) worked with cold chain company Inficold to set up the 2.2 million-rupee ($27,100) facility, which is open to about 235 farmers such as Lalmuankimi across several villages in the area.
It meant Lalmuankimi could store the rest of her last harvest in February, 7-8 kg of oranges, instead of discarding them.
She took the fruit out of cold storage in August when it was out of season and managed to sell it for 250 rupees per kilo – five times the price she would normally have expected to fetch.
“After hours of backbreaking toil … I can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of both my farm and labor, as there is hardly any wastage that I have to worry about,” Lalmuankimi said.
Although India has thousands of cold storage facilities for produce – about 8,200 as of 2020, official data shows – these units are connected to the electricity grid rather than powered by solar.
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