It is quite frequent for many countries to face serious problems in undertaking the safe and timely collection and storage of newly harvested crops. In Cyprus, due to limited storage capacity, almost every year thousands of tons of harvested barley and wheat remain stored in the open for 4-5 months. In some years considerable amounts of grain are destroyed by rain. Deterioration and loss of grain stored in the open is also caused by attacks by birds, rodents and insects. In Australia this problem was addressed by the development of bunker storage (Banks and Sticka, 1981; McCabe and Champ, 1981), while in Israel emphasis was placed on the development of hermetically sealed bunkers (Navarro et al., 1984).
The need to provide a rapid and effective solution to the problem of storing newly harvested grain in Cyprus prompted the Cyprus Grain Commission, in cooperation with the Volcani Center of Israel, to develop a modified platform hermetic-storage system. Aspects of the Cyprus platform storage have been published (Navarro et al., 1993; Varnava et al., 1994), while this paper reports on the quality of hermetically stored grain, with particular reference to the problem of mycoflora and mycotoxins (Bullerman, 1979), and on a cost-benefit analysis of the platform method.
