Rice Mill Modernisation

Modernization of Rice milling – A necessity in future

Rice is the staple food of one-third of the world's population, and is gaining more popularity in the west, for it is a light healthy food with most of the vital nutrients. Rice is grown in the wet regions of the tropics, derived from wild grasses probably native to India and Southeast Asia. Rice is unique among cereal crops in that it is grows standing in water. The yields are very large per crop. Rice takes 150–200 days to mature i warm, wet conditions. During its growing period, it needs to be flooded either by the heavy monsoon rains or by irrigation. This restricts the cultivation of swamp rice, the usual kind, to level land and terraces. The major rice producing countries are China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. China (193 million metric tons) and India (130 million tons) alone account for half of the total global crop of 630 million tons of paddy per annum.

Outside Asia, centres of rice production include the Po Valley in Italy, Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California in the USA.

The worldwide acceptance of rice has increased the demand for it but the climatic and geographic requirement to cultivate rice does not allow all the countries to produce rice. This clubbed with the population increase drives us to look at means to increase the production of rice. One way would be to look at newer agricultural fields to produce rice and another way would be to optimise the yield from the existing produce. Better machines and automation bring in higher efficiency and yield to the rice milling process.

Conventional Rice milling Process

Rice processing (drying, cleaning, hulling, whitening) is predominantly an agricultural activity. The rice miller’s motto is - “Remove as little as possible and as much as necessary from the rice grains”. Before the rice grains are fit for consumption, they pass through numerous processes. Paddy rice is cleaned, husked, and graded then the clean but still...