Shelling a peanut? No big deal. But what if you had to do that all day long, by hand? It can be a painful business, as Jock Brandis learned.

  

Brandis, 63, is an inspiring figure I encountered while researching GLIMMER. For much of his career, he was a mister fix-it on Canadian movie sets. If a special camera or lighting rig was needed for a difficult shot, he would cobble it together, using whatever materials were close at hand. “You learned to hit the ground running and just start hacking away at a problem,” Brandis says. “I used to think of it as the Rambo school of design.” (See Brandis in action in the video at the end of this post.)

 

A few years back Brandis was approached by a friend who’d been doing volunteer work with the Peace Corps in a small village in Mali, Africa. The village water treatment system needed fixing and Brandis agreed to come and help. But while he was there he noticed something else. “I saw a lot of women in the village shelling sun-dried peanuts by hand,” he recalls. The peanut crop was the lifeblood of this village and there was pressure to get as many peeled nuts to market as possible. “These women were doing this all day long and their fingers were actually bleeding.”

  

Brandis inquired as to whether it might not be a bad idea for the women to use some type of tool or machine to make the job easier. The response was along the lines of: Why yes, that’s a great idea—how soon can you make one for us?

  

And so Brandis spent the next year trying to design a peanut sheller. His research into previous attempts to make this type of device uncovered one design, from Bulgaria, with a cone shape that sparked an idea. Brandis designed a prototype that was essentially a cone built within a larger outer cone, with a crank attached so that the inner cone could be rotated.

  

When a peanut was dropped into this contraption and the crank handle was turned, the nut would spiral down between the two cones—which were angled so that the space between them narrowed as the nut rolled down, producing enough friction to cause the shell to gradually disintegrate. Brandis had to get the angles of the cones just right: Peanut shell removal is a delicate matter because you don’t want to remove the nut’s brown parchment-covering beneath the shell, which serves as a necessary bacterial barrier. He also had to deal with the mysteries of centrifugal force. He’d assumed the cones should be wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, but the nuts rolled better on a narrow-to-wide track—so Brandis, literally, had to turn his original idea upside down.

 

The real genius of Brandis’ design was in his choice of materials. Others had tried to carve and shape nut shellers from malleable substances such as metal or wood; Brandis wanted to make his cones from stone. “People thought that was ridiculous,” he told me. But Brandis was doing what any forward-thinking designer should do: Enlarging the problem and trying to develop a bigger, more far-reaching solution. He reasoned that if he made his sheller from molded concrete, he could then give the villagers not just the sheller but the mold, too—so they could easily make more shellers of their own just by mixing up some cement.

  

When he finally had a working sheller he returned to Mali and donated the device, and the mold, to the village. Using the device, nuts could be readied for market 50 times faster—which caused productivity to jump. And no fingers were bloodied along the way.

  

Brandis estimates there are now several thousand shellers in use, not just in Mali but also throughout Africa and Asia. He chose not to patent the idea, because he wanted people to be able to use his basic design and molds to make their own shellers, perhaps adapting and improving them along the way.

  

And that is exactly what happened, as local designers began adding their own wrinkles. “One guy wrapped rubber around the rotor and began using it to husk coffee,” Brandis says. Others were using the device to shell pecans, hazelnuts, and Brazil nuts. It turned out Brandis had created a “universal nut sheller,” as it is now known. One of the latest twists has come about recently in India, where someone figured out that if you used the sheller to press the oil from the Jatropha plant, you end up with a source of biofuel and a good fertilizer.

  

While continuing to try to get the sheller more widely distributed, Brandis is also designing other low-cost tools and machines for the developing world—primarily using his material of choice, concrete. He’s created a small nonprofit group, the Full Belly Project, with a couple of former Peace Corps volunteers and a shoestring budget. Yet he has been able to have an impact on the lives of people halfway around the world.

  

I asked Brandis if he ever felt limited by his lack of resources. “No, just the opposite,” he says. “Constraints make you more creative, or at least that’s how it works for me. If you’ve got all kinds of options available to you, then how do you know what to do or where to begin? But if all I’ve got to work with is some wood and cement and maybe a bicycle wheel, I’m ready to go.”

 

Click below for Part 1 of a two-part documentary about The Full Belly Project.  (8:30 min; Brandis appears at 3 minutes in.)