Professor Joan Fulton of the Purdue University Center for Food and Agricultural Business has advised farmers to adopt proper means to store their grains after harvest to reduce post-harvest losses and improve food security.

She urged farmers in the country to adopt the Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags method in storing their grains since the technology could keep the grains for more than one year after harvesting.

Prof. Fulton made the suggestion in Tamale at the weekend, during a training of trainer’s workshop on PICS, which was aimed at improving food security and increase income of smallholder farmers.

The participants from the Upper East, Upper West and Northern regions were trained on the hermetic triple bagging system - a chemical free storage method of storing grains developed in the 1980’s by Prof. Larry Murdock of Purdue University.

The PICS project was introduced in Africa in 2007 to help farmers to store cowpea but it has now been improved upon to cover all cereals produced by farmers. The project is aimed at preventing weevil infestation on cereals.

Prof. Fulton said the project would cover one thousand communities in five regions in Ghana and would be implemented between August 2015 and June 2016.