70. Unloading Grâu (Wheat)

I have never missed gravity wagons more in my life. The manager of my partner organization also has a pasta manufacturing company. The other day I was helping him unload wheat at the local flour mill so they could make flour for the pasta.

In the US, a farmer would usually take his grain, by wagon or semi, to a local co-operative or business who would dry it and clean it, if necessary, then put it in trucks or trains to send to companies, such as flour mills, or possibly larger grain companies like Consolidated Grain and Barge, Cargill or other larger companies.

In Moldova, most grains are grown by small farmers will usually be used by the household and not sold to the market. All the corn my host family grew comes back to the house to be ground up for the chickens and ducks. In my village, the wheat is either taken back to the house to feed animals and people or taken to the flour mill.

Back to my flour mill story, generally in the US the semi or wagon unloading the grain will be weighed, then it will dump its load into a hole in the ground, which then the grain will be moved by an auger into a grain storage bin. Then the wagon will be weighed again to know how much grain was unloaded. Well, when I went to help the manager of my NGO unload his wheat at the flour mill, it was a three man job that took a couple hours.

The truck had a 8’x14’x4’ bed full or wheat. One man stayed in the bed of the dump truck and filled up 10 gallon metal pots, which another man and I each took a handle on each side and walked about 10 paces and up one step in the building to unload into a storage area so it could later be made into flour.

I started to think of ways to improve this set-up. If this mill had a place outside the truck could have just dumped its load of wheat in 10 minutes at the most instead of the 2 hours which it took us. But then I realized that the majority of people coming to the mill have the little amount of wheat they could raise on 0.5 hectors (1.2 acres) minus what they are feeding to their animals. Plus, the only reasons to make the mill more efficient in unloading wheat, is if the difficulty of unloading wheat is driving away customers and/or the mill wants to produce more flour.

So, for now I think the flour mill is working well. If they wanted to increase the ease of unloading I hope they come or I hear about it so that I can be involved.