Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Friday, February 16, 2024

High-output soybean thresher of Ghana

In 2024, the Soybean Innovation Lab in collaboration with the thresher designer Hakim Abdul-Karim from Ghana, will release a new thresher design with the capacity to thresh more than 1000 kilograms of soybean per hour!

The fabrication manual for this high-output thresher will be made publicly available throughout Africa, but it will be available in Ghana only through a licensing agreement with Hakim. Prices for this thresher will vary by manufacturer and country but will be sold for approximately $8,000 by Hakim’s shop in Upper West Ghana.

SIL made its first open-source thresher design publicly available in 2018. The SIL Multi-crop thresher was able to process all crops except groundnut. A SIL team from the U.S. and Ghana spent two years training over 200 fabricators in 12 countries on thresher construction. Those skills the team learned are applicable to other thresher models, as well as other agricultural equipment. This acquired skillset includes the ability to read computer plans for equipment fabrication.

Although that original SIL thresher was extremely fast with maize, it was not as quick as the promoters
had hoped for threshing soybean due to the need to feed the plants in whole and with all stems oriented in the same direction. Because we were only able to reach a 300-500 kilogram per day output capacity, the SIL designers went back to the drawing board and designed the second generation of the SIL multi-crop thresher (MCT).

Watch the first test of high-output soybean thresher:

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