The University of Saskatchewan could soon be home to North America’s first BoMill seed sorter, a machine that can sort as many as 20,000 seeds per second using near infrared technology.
Tom Scott, chair in feed processing technology at the U of S, said the BoMill sorter can analyze every seed in a sample according to moisture content, crude protein, starch profile, mineral content, bread making quality and malting quality.
Seeds are exposed to light waves in the infrared spectrum, analyzed and divided into as many as three seed lots at a rate of three tonnes per hour.
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The machine fits on a desktop and costs $400,000.
Scott said near infrared seed sorters have the potential to change the way bulk commodities are bought and sold in North America.
Right now, most bulk commodities are graded according to visual characteristics and are traded according to bushel weights.
However, he said farmers could extract the maximum value out of their crops if they were sorted and priced according to quality characteristics and nutritional value.
For example, feed wheat is often discounted by $100 per tonne or more, even though most of the kernels in the sample are still suitable for milling and bread making.
If a feed wheat sample contains 25 percent low quality or damaged kernels and 75 percent high quality kernels, a near infrared sorter could divide a 100 tonne shipment into 75 tonnes of milling wheat and 25 tonnes of feed.
For large producers, the economic benefits would be substantial.
The same sample could be sorted several times, depending on the end user’s requirements, each time using a different quality parameter.
For example, a malting barley sample could first be sorted for sprouting and then resorted for protein content.
Scott said studies have shown that crude protein levels from the kernels in a single head of wheat can vary by as much as six percent, depending on environmental conditions, maturity, ripening and a kernel’s position on the spike.
“We buy commodities based on bulk densities or bushel weights and that has nothing to do with nutrient value,” he said.
“This machine takes every single seed in a sample, scans it using NIR based on what you want to measure and can sort it into three different fractions at 20,000 seeds per second…. A machine like this could change everything we do with grain.”
The BoMill is manufactured in Sweden and designed to handle wheat, barley and durum.
It is commonly used in Sweden to divide wheat into high-quality milling wheat for bread making and low-quality grain for vodka production.
The Australian malting industry uses it to ensure uniform, high-quality malting barley samples with consistent germination and malting characteristics.
At the U of S, the machine will be used primarily in feed research projects at the Canadian Feed Research Centre now under construction in North Battleford, Sask.
Scott said fractionating bulk grain samples according to nutritional characteristics will allow researchers to develop specialized rations for experimental or commercial use and maximize the nutritional value of bulk feedstocks.
The machine could potentially be used to remove diseased kernels or seeds that carry mycotoxins associated with fusarium head blight.
Near infrared technology uses light to analyze an object’s chemical composition.
Each seed will absorb or reflect different wavelengths of light, depending on its chemical profile.
The seed’s absorption or reflectance is used as a basis for sorting.
Scott said the university has not agreed to buy the sorter.
Instead, the American company handling distribution rights for BoMill has agreed to rent the unit to the university for one year to provide proof of concept.
Scott is hoping the machine will be operating in the North Battleford facility by August.
