By Darren Hefty
When’s the last time you visited a soybean seed conditioning plant? I’m sure we’ve all seen the air and screen cleaners used to take out most of the dirt, pods, and splits. Likely a gravity table, the machine that takes out anything that doesn’t weigh as much as a good bean, is no mystery to you either. How about a color sorter, though?
In recent years, some of the larger seed companies have been adding a machine to the seed conditioning process called a color sorter. They individually scan each soybean seed and use tiny shots of air to kick out any beans that are off-color. They are excellent at removing dirt, splits, and green beans that have made it past the primary seed cleaning equipment. The problem with them, and the reason why more seed cleaning plants haven’t added them, is that they haven’t been cheap.
There have been many improvements in color sorters over the last few years. In fact, we’ve recently added the lastest model of color sorters to seed conditioning facilities in our system at Baltic, SD; Centerville, SD; and Pembina, ND. Of course, even the best machines can only work with the seed that’s brought to them. If the seed was 8% moisture coming out of the field, like many of the soybeans harvested last year, there will still be some challenges with seed quality. The whole process of producing good seed begins with all the practices that seed growers use during the growing season, right up to how the combine is set to harvest the seed and how the seed gets handled on the way to the conditioning plant.
Using a color sorter at the end of the conditioning process is another step toward improved seed quality for you to plant. If you’re interested in visiting one of the seed plants I mentioned above, give us a call. We’d be glad to show you one of the machines in action.
We will be able to clean just as fast as we have in the past, if not even a little faster, as we have purchased fairly good-sized machines to handle our volume.
In our efforts to deliver the very best seed and seed quality to our customers, we will now place an even greater focus on the seed that our growers produce; and thanks to these new color sorters, our soybean quality should be as good as any in the country.