The seed cleaner is located on the east side of the elevator and is so large it takes up three floors. It can clean wheat at a rate of 100 tonnes per hour. At this rate, it takes the seed cleaner only 46 hours or about 4 days to clean the seed for a 50 car rail shipment. The seed cleaner not only separates all foreign matter from the grain, but it also sorts the foreign matter into six different groupings. The seed cleaner has six refuse bins holding wild oats, salvage wheat, mixed grains, salvage canola, cracked kernels and a small dust bin. Interestingly enough, there's a certain amount of revenue that comes from the materials that's separated out of the grain. Of the 55 tonnes of chaff sold annually, 2/3rds of it is chaff and 1/3 of it is small seeds and cracked kernels. All of this is sold to the animal feed industry.
This is a complicated piece of equipment completing a multiplicity of tasks. Mr. Christopherson gave me a detailed walk-around. He explained the many different operations of the seed cleaner, taking me around the machinery on all the different levels.
The material that's removed during the seed cleaning process is placed in the bins below the seed cleaner or is sucked up to the top of the elevator through the silver tubes running through many of the photographs. The clean grain is elevated back to the top of the elevator by a small leg. At the top of the elevator it's placed onto a paddle drag that deposits it into bins 2, 4, 12, 13, 27 or bin 28.. The dust separator deposits the dust it collects into the chaff holding bin on the north side of the elevator. All the silver tubes in the three photos below are part of this scavenging system; removing the dust and chaff from the different parts of the seed cleaner.
The three photos below show the three levels of the seed cleaning plant starting at the top and working our way down. Altogether, the seed cleaner stretches over a height of 70 feet. |
