Compact rice mill

Producing high-quality rice with reduced milling losses would contribute to improving the food and nutritional security of consumers. A good quality milled rice at a competitive price would also enable small-scale rice millers to penetrate the local and international markets.

In developing countries, the old husking mills remain to be the most used and still contribute a large proportion of the total milled rice production. But the old husking mills cause high grain breakage with low-milled rice and head rice recovery and have limitations in milling aromatic fine-grain rice varieties. It does not separate rice bran from the husk, which prevents millers from optimizing the benefits of rice by-products. While there has been a huge increase in automatic and semi-automatic rice mills in the last decades, small rice millers lack the financial resources and technical capability to operate.

The compact rice mill, a small-scale, 2-stage rubber rollers milling machine, is a promising solution to replace the antiquated rice husking machines (Engelberg huller). Compact rice mills have different capacities and are equipped with components that can clean, separate the husk from rice bran, and polish the rice. The cost of the equipment and its operation is less compared with the automatic and semi-automatic milling machinery. With the compact rice mill: (a) at least a 5% increase in milling recovery can be achieved; (b) the percentage of broken rice can be improved by 24% and 11.5 % in unparboiled and parboiled aromatic long grain rice varieties, respectively; (c) the percentage of broken rice can be reduced by 62 % on the average for unparboiled and parboiled local varieties; and (d) the production of rice bran is an added value and can provide an additional income source for millers.

The rice husks that the compact rice mills produce separately can be used as an alternative energy source over carbon-producing fossil fuels.

Compact rice mill

Further reading