Cassava is an enormously versatile crop used not only in meals or as a snack, but can also be milled into flour, replacing wheat flour. It is grown all over the African continent, mostly by subsistence farmers who harvest manually, and has enormous potential to improve food security if mechanised so that it can be farmed at scale.
The labour intensity of cassava harvesting is the biggest constraint to its commercial production. Manual harvesting is very slow, painful and inefficient. Professor Emmanuel Bobobee developed the Mechanical Cassava Harvester, an affordable tractor-mounted mechanical tool which turns up the soil to expose the root vegetable without damaging it. It takes five to ten minutes to harvest one cassava plant by hand, depending on the softness of the soil. The mechanical harvester can uproot one plant every second.
Agricultural mechanisation is key to providing African countries with food security and independence, and in attracting young farmers to an aging profession that needs to be adopted by the youth in order to continue to benefit Africa's economic development. Cassava also has industrial applications that further the case for its production to be scaled and mechanised.
