The Ag Innovation Showcase offers a platform to innovators across the agricultural value chain. Koolmill Systems is focused on reducing the amount of rice wasted in processing. Alec Anderson explains that for half the world’s population, rice is life: but we need to change the way we produce it if it’s going to keep feeding the world’s exploding population. Registration is now open for the Ag Innovation Showcase 2017: visit www.agshowcase.com.

Alec Anderson: Today, rice feeds 3.5 billion people. By 2050 that’s going to be six billion people. Production’s going to have to increase by 70 percent. But that’s against the backdrop of too much water in the wrong place, not enough water in the right places. You’ve got land stress, you’ve got chemical issues, and every one degree increase in overnight temperature will reduce rice yields by 10 percent. So we’ve got a lot of negative factors depressing the ability to produce rice. It’s going to be fundamentally important that we get the maximum return from what we already grow, as well as needing to grow more.

The industry’s evolved over 100+ years, and it’s gone more towards large rice mills. That means you need a lot of infrastructure, you need a lot of cash, and you need a lot of rice. That means you’ve got to transport that rice into the mill, then you’ve got to redistribute it back out from the mill. The machines themselves are relatively inefficient, and every time you handle the rice you lose some, every time you process it you lose some.

They have augers and screens, and the auger forces the rice into a chamber formed by a screen; the screen breaks the rice, the rice breaks the screen. And we’ve eliminated the auger, we’ve eliminated the screen. It’s a very gentle process, a very efficient process.

We do something with the rice. We treat it as a fluid, and we work with it, very gently. Everybody else does something mechanically to it. And we call the company KoolMill because that excess power that goes into conventional machines comes out as heat in the rice. So you’ve got mechanical stress and thermal stress; and by taking that away, you get a much better quality product.

For instance, a basmati miller in India would have to mill 10 tonnes of paddy to produce five tonnes of white head rice. We can do it with eight tonnes of paddy. So that’s the kind of impact that we can have.