Saturday, April 16, 2011

Seed Cleaning Pictures

It has been another busy season so far cleaning seed for  local farmers.

In this picture, I am at the local feed and seed dealer cleaning a 20 tonne trailer load of oats. They were very good quality oats and cleaned well in just over 10 hours.

I'm looking forward to cleaning a trailer load of soybeans for another customer soon. Beans clean much fast than oats. It should take me only 6 hours to clean 30 tonne of beans.

Here is a picture of the oats traveling over the top screen. This screen removes larger pieces of chaff and straw. These screenings slide down the chute to the right which I collect in a pail than discarded.

The grain falls through the openings in the screen down into the cleaner where the grain passes over 2 smaller screens separating the grain seed from weed seed.

This picture shows just how much weed seed and chaff the cleaner can remove. This day I cleaned 14 tonne consisting of  wheat, barley, oats, and soybeans. The pails and bags are full of chaff,weed seeds and light immature kernels of grain.



The chaff and light seeds on the ground are what the fan blows out. Fortunately cleanup is the responsibility of the customer. I try my best not to make too big  of a mess.     Colin

4 comments:

Diann said...

Interesting and informative for this city girl! Thanks for posting, Colin!

Diann said...

Ok, question! What happens with the chaff, weed seeds and immature kernals of grain? Sorry if that's a dumb question!

Paula said...

Most farmers have an 'unofficial' compost pile where they dump anything that will eventually decompose. That's where all the extra gets dumped.

There are no dumb questions Diann. In fact I told Colin he should just say it goes to compost, but you know men :)

Kimberly said...

Thanks for the post Colin, very educational...for us homeschooling types!