Jan van Someren Graver Award

To honour Jan, we are have introduced the "Jan van Someren Graver Award for the Most Contribution to the Fumigation Industry".  This can be to an individual, Company, Government Department or supplier. We welcome your nominations. Great news to share is that Control Equipment Pty Ltd is sponsoring this award by providing the perpetual trophy and an individual trophy for each winner, for at least the next 10 years. 

For those who knew Jan, he was very special.

Jan’s involvement with fumigation commenced early in the 1960s, when he joined a pest management business in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to manage a contract that involved protection of the Tanzanian national (domestic and export) food and commodity stocks.

After migrating to Australia in 1974, he spent 10 years in Papua New Guinea working with the Department of Primary Industry, where his work involved quality control and preservation of the broad range of commodities exported from this nation to ensure their acceptability in overseas markets.

While in Papua New Guinea he worked on a number of collaborative projects with CSIRO that involved novel applications of controlled atmospheres and the introduction of improved methods for storage, fumigation, and transport of several of the commodities exported from Papua New Guinea. He also worked closely with the national agricultural quarantine agency and AQIS to introduce Quality Accreditation systems that allowed door-to-door delivery of commodities into Australia.

In 1984 Jan joined CSIRO Entomology where he worked on a number of projects that involved development of novel methods of fumigating bagged grains stored in sealed plastic enclosures using controlled atmospheres and phosphine. He was also involved in the early development of practical methods used to apply some of the ‘new’ fumigants discovered by the CSIRO Stored Grain Research Laboratory

He retired from CSIRO at the end of July 2004 and operated a consultancy ‘Commodity Storage Solutions Pty Ltd’ that provided, inter alia, training for fumigators.

During his career, Jan worked with a broad range of commodities including - cereal grains, 'coarse grains' (maize, millet, sorghum, etc), beverage commodities (cocoa, coffee, tea), copra and copra cake, dried fruit, flour, food nuts (cashews), legumes / pulses, oilseeds, (cotton seed, groundnuts, bambara nuts, soybeans, soybean grits and expeller, etc), spices (chillies, cardamom, etc.), and tobacco.

As a fumigator, Jan had more than 40 years practical experience in a wide range of situations including bagged and bulk grain, cinemas, freight containers, buildings, storage structures, and ships. He worked with carbon disulphide, carbonyl sulfide, chloropicrin, controlled atmospheres, ethyl formate, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, methyl bromide, and phosphine.

He was a member of the initial group convened by AQIS to develop the AQIS Standard for Fumigation with Methyl Bromide. He is also the author of the FAO ‘Guide to Fumigation under Gas-Proof Sheets’ and co-author of three volumes of the ‘Suggested Recommendations for the Fumigation of Grain in the ASEAN Region’.

Jan had formal ‘train the trainer’ qualifications and was involved in the development of a computer assisted learning system for grain storage – Grain Storage Tutor (GST) that included a fumigation segment based on the AQIS Standard for fumigation with methyl bromide. He kept abreast of developments in fumigation procedures by attending fumigation training courses and conferences with a strong fumigation bias.

Jan sadly is no longer with us.

Nominations have closed. Judging is currently in progress.