Storage of wet, moist and dry corn using plastic hermetic material

One of the country's main problems is the lack of proper handling and safe storage of agricultural products. The Philippines' insufficiency in providing the necessary facilities, equipment and technology gives a major disadvantage towards a relatively higher production and longer storage-life of crops. Hermetic storage systems are introduced to phase out the use of chemicals on storage. An experiment was conducted to test and evaluate the suitability and effect of plastic hermetic materials using corn and various moisture levels namely: dry at 14% MC, moist at 22% MC and relatively high-moisture or wet at 35%. Approximately 495 kg of wet corn samples were divided methodically into 450 kg (150 kg each for the wet, moist and dry samples to be placed into the hermetic materials) and 45 kg (15 kg each for the control samples of wet, moist and dry). Effect of the storage material on the three moisture levels of corn was evaluated using six parameters: moisture content, ethanol, aflatoxin, germination, oxygen and carbon dioxide. In addition, a physical or sensory assessment was conducted at the end of experiment. Experiment design was Completely Randomized Design with subsampling. Results showed that the moisture content of the wet, moist and dry corn did not change much from the initial values with % difference of only 0.2%, 1.4% and 9.3%, respectively. This showed that the material did not allow moisture transfer as compared to the control which showed very high change in moisture content due to equilibrium. Ethanol test revealed that the hermetic samples undergone fermentation process. The amount of which was proportional to the moisture content as compared to the control samples which had only slightly fermented. Moist and dry samples exhibited decrease in aflatoxin (49 ppb and 0.76 ppb) due to the drying process while wet samples increased to 222.83 ppb as compared to the initial 53 ppb of aflatoxin count. Germination test had shown that moist and wet had only 0-2% germination capacity while dry had almost 60%. Control samples also showed high % germination. Percent O2 in the bags was very low for wet and moist while samples took an almost ambient condition. On the other hand, percent CO2 was very high for both wet and moist samples while dry samples took a range of 0-7% only. As a conclusion, the hermetic material was suitable for the corn with different moisture levels as it was able to maintain the moisture content and aflatoxin count and simulated a hermetic environment through the behavior of O2 and CO2 inside the bags. The germination test served to direct one to first determine the purpose of storage since hermetic storage basically kills high moisture seeds making them only good as feeds, whereas, it allows feasible germination for dry seeds.