With 17.5% of world population, food safety and security is of primary concern in India. Despite increase in food grain production in last decade, there is heavy loss of food grains during transit and storage. This is due to lack of adequate infrastructures and technologies to monitor adverse environmental conditions that result in storage losses. In this paper, we propose a topology for wireless sensor networks called two-tailed chain topology that is suitable for efficiently monitoring of environmental factors in food grain depots. The proposed topology is designed by considering all infrastructure constraints of a food grain depot. Results show that the proposed topology is better than traditional topologies in terms of detection accuracy and coverage. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.