Colour sorters will become necessary pieces of equipment if rural seed cleaning plants are to survive, says an official of an Alberta seed cleaning plant.
Beaver County deputy reeve Ron Parham said a new colour sorter has extended the life of the county’s 1950s-era seed cleaning plant in Holden for several more years.
“If you don’t have one, then you’ll be left at the way side. It’s one of the essential tools these days,” he said.
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Plant revenue from cleaning increased to $172,000 this year from $137,000 last year, despite shutting down for a month in January to install the sorter.
Yarham expects revenue to increase to $224,500 next year.
The plant may also expand its storage facility and upgrade the rest of its equipment to help speed up the cleaning process.
“These old plants were not ever designed for that much grain to go through,” said Yarham.
The plant is trying to hire staff to run a second shift, he added.
The increased demand for colour sorters is not just because of ergot, the cereal-infecting fungus that hit prairie cereal crops this year.
Bill Sinclair, manager of the Bashaw Seed Cleaning plant in Bashaw, Alta., said it’s a necessary piece of equipment for the modern seed plant to clean barley out of wheat, wheat out of barley and wild oats out of oats.
“It’s the next level of service in cleaning technology. It will be an expected service soon,” said Sinclair, whose plant was the first in the province to install a colour sorter two years ago.
The plant now runs 24 hours a day almost year round.
The sorter doubled the plant’s revenues but also increased labour and repair costs.
The plant is considering expanding again to keep up with the demand. For the first time in years, the co-op has paid income tax in-stead of writing off losses.
Sinclair estimates a dozen of Alberta’s 71 co-op and municipal seed cleaning plants have installed colour sorters, which should double in the next couple of years.
Mark Kaese, manager of Battle River Seed Cleaning in Paradise Valley, Alta., said the plant has seen a steady increase in business since installing its colour sorter.
It originally bought the colour sorter to clean weed seeds out of pedigreed seed.
“We looked at the Bashaw plant and thought we better have one,” Kaese said. “It’s a typical thing in business. If you stand still, you go backwards.”
He said the past two years of ergot-infected grain have increased their business 15 percent.
Unlike most of the province’s seed cleaning plants, which were built in the 1950s and 1960s and have limited storage and cleaning capacity, the Paradise Valley plant was built in 1993 after lightening struck the old plant and can clean 500 to 600 bushels per hour.
“We thought it as a disaster when it burned down and a year later we thought what a stroke of luck,” said Kaese.
The Vermilion Seed Cleaning plant plans to install a colour sorter in 2012 to help remove ergot from wheat.
Manager Mel Reid said the plant does a good job eliminating ergot using a gravity separator but will save about four percent more wheat using the colour sorter.
“The big push is to upgrade producers’ crops so they can sell their wheat,” he said. “Most of the crop is unsalable unless they clean it.”
