By Martin Hellicar
THE AVERAGE Cypriot consumes almost a tonne of cereals every year, either directly or indirectly in the form of meat or dairy produce. Storing the vast quantity of grains needed to satisfy this massive demand can be a real headache.
Unless treated, 600,000 tonnes of wheat and barley can very quickly turn into a seething mass of weevils and other grain pests.
It is a headache that the Cyprus Grain Commission is now tackling with the very latest in pest-control technology.
The Commission has recently installed the Siroflo fumigation system at its metal storage silos in Larnaca, Limassol and Paphos. The system was developed in Australia and has been used there since 1992. Cyprus is the first country after Australia to use the Siroflo system.
“It is an automatic system for insect removal; a fumigation process used in Australia on a wide scale with great results,” Grain Commission officer Yiannakis Potsos told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
“We are forerunners,” the Commission man boasted.
The system was first tried out during an international seminar on grain storage held in Cyprus last year. The Grain Commission liked what it saw and decided to take the plunge.
The new system is seen as efficient, simple and safe to use.
“The traditional method is to put phosphene tablets in the silos,” Potsos explained. “Someone had to pick them up and throw them into the silo for them to vaporise and kill the insects.”
“Now, with the new system, you don’t have to have someone up on top of the silo tossing the tablets in one at a time by hand. You just press a button, the insecticide is in a bottle in gas form and it enters slowly on its own and acts for 15 days. It does its job and does not leave residues in the wheat or barley,” Potsos said.
“It is all much simpler and does not put people at risk climbing up onto the silos and picking up the phosphene tablets in their hands, which can be very dangerous.”
The new fumigation system is easy to install and cheaper in the long run than the traditional method, Potsos added.
“All you need to do is put the piping in,” he said.
The Grain Commission is looking into setting up the Siroflo system for its massive concrete silo at Limassol port, which holds 75,000 tonnes of grain – 50 per cent more that the combined capacity of the metal silos at Limassol, Larnaca and Paphos.
With Cyprus becoming increasingly reliant on imported cereals, sound grain storage is becoming more important.
The country currently grows only a fifth of the 600,000 tonnes of grain it consumes every year.
If the droughts experienced over the past five years become the norm, then the island is likely to become even less self-sufficient in cereals. Rain- fed wheat and barley crops have been hard-hit in the last two years in particular, Potsos said.
The loss of the island’s principal ‘bread-basket’ – the Mesaoria plane – to the occupying Turks is also a significant blow to grain production.
But the most important factor increasing reliance on imported grains is probably the rapid increase in intensive animal farming over the past decade or so. The growth in pig and cow farms has sent demand for feed cereals soaring.
