The Full Belly Project
by Ron Marshall

Since I spent part of my growing-up years on a small farm and because I have been interested in missions for as long as I can remember, I was very interested to read about the “Full Belly Project” in an article in Our State magazine a few weeks ago because it seemed to be an opportunity for missions and agriculture to come together because it could help missionaries in farming areas to help people to improve their diet and perhaps also to put some money in their pockets without either the missionary or the people having to spend very much.
If you want a copy of the magazine article, e-mail me your regular mailing address and I will send you one, or you may go to website at http://www.fullbellyproject.org/history.php. If you don’t want to type
all of that in, simply do a Google “search on “full belly project.” 
Ron Marshall: literashare@yahoo.com 

The Universal Nut Sheller and the ”Full Belly Project”

 In 2001 while on visit to village in Mali, Jock Brandis saw women and children shelling huge piles of peanuts by hand. After talking with the village leader, Brandis learned that the government wanted villagers to grow cotton because it was a cash crop. Because cotton depleted the soil, the villagers were planting peanuts in the same rows because they replenished the soil and also because peanuts were a main source of protein in the Malian diet. In spite of the benefits of peanuts since shelling them  by hand was so slow the villagers did not want to grow them. Brandis wanted to help the people so he promised to send them a peanut shelling machine when he returned to the United States.
When he could not find a machine that shelled peanuts, Brandis invented a device that is now known as the Universal Nut Sheller. The magazine article describes as having “a low tech-design of just a few concrete and metal parts” which “makes the process of shelling peanuts as much as 50 times faster, and it’s simple enough to be easily fabricated in any part of the world.”
When Brandis returned to the village in Mali with the nut sheller, it was an instant success. Soon word about the nut sheller began to spread, and Brandis was unable to keep up with requests his new invention. So in 2003 Brandis and a group of Coastal Carolina Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, based in Wilmington, North Carolina, incorporated into the nonprofit “Full Belly Project” to distribute information about the machines.
Since then according to the article, “the nut shellers have helped to relieve hunger and create economic opportunities around the world, with shellers going to the Bahamas, Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, India, Kenya, Mali, Malawi, Nigeria, the Philippines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan, Uganda, and Sudan where in addition to shelling peanuts, “people have used the shellers for processing coffee, shea, neem, and jatropha, which is used in making biodiesel fuel.”
As work has continued on the project “volunteers have also created a peanut thresher, a half-sized sheller that’s easy to transport, a pedal-powered sheller, and an electric sheller.” Also, although nut shellers have been mainly distributed through service organizations and non-governmental organizations that are already in the field, Brandis and his associates are hoping to set up a network of manufacturing facilities around the world.

-  Adapted from an article published in the April, 2009 Issue of Our State magazine, pgs. 92 -94

Take a look at: http://www.fullbellyproject.org/history.php.