Project RICE (Renewable, Inclusive, Carbon-positive Energy)

Partners: Straw Innovations

Country: Philippines

Technology: Leave no one behind technologies and business models

Stage: Mid

Stage: Round 10

Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels and rural, smallholder farmers in remote areas across Africa and Asia often pay more than double for diesel-fuel and fertilisers. This high cost comes with further challenges such as waste-heat from engines, voliatilisation from festilisers and increased carbon emissions. Straw Innovations is working to address these challenges by focusing on the world’s number 1 food crop, rice.

Operating in the Philippines, Straw Innovations has created a suite of technologies for collecting rice straw at harvest time, avoiding field burning/rotting, which accounts for almost half of rice emissions. In this project, they will convert their ‘straw-catcher’ machine to run on solar-PV electricity/batteries instead of diesel.