The Effect of Aeration and Circulation Treatments on Maintaining Quality of Bulk Stored Paddy Rice

Abstract

Bulk storage is, progressively, becoming an important method for paddy rice storage in Egypt. This study was carried out to investigate the role of aeration in maintaining quality of raw paddy rice stored in bulk. Three aeration treatments, i.e., no aeration (control), aeration by using a centrifuge fan and circulation, were tested for a period of six months.Aeration treatments were applied every two weeks. Random samples were drawn from three sections in each bin i.e., upper, middle and lower, at each interval.The results indicated that aeration treatments, sampling sections and sampling dates (storage duration) caused significant changes in the studied characteristics of stored paddy especially, temperature and moisture content of grains. Aeration treatments tended to decrease number of pests in stored rice, thus, maintaining the quality of stored rice throughout the storage period. Significant simple correlation coefficients were, also found between pairs of studied characters such as moisture and 1000 grain weight (0.31*), bran and germ percentage (0.224*), broken percentage (0.207*) and yellow grains percentage (0.302*). However, moisture was negatively correlated with temperature (-0.401**).