OCTOBER 2018 SEEDWORLD.COM / 27 IN MY FIRST Insiders column, I intro- duced our seedsmanship approach to designing equipment for the seed industry. Our concept of “seedsmanship” starts with trust. Don’t get me wrong, we need paperwork, drawings and approv- als, but so much of our business is sealed with the trust of a handshake or phone call. For me, this is the very best part of the seed industry. On the technical side, seedsmanship involves designing seed handling equip- ment that does not degrade, contaminate or throw away your good seed. Being a design/build contractor and manufacturer lets us “bake it in” and eliminate a middle- man. Flow angles are carefully considered as are hopper and valley angles. This gives the equipment operator easy ability to inspect and clean out to prevent any contamination. Drops are minimized both in distance and frequency. Product on product is a great way to absorb and coun- teract the energy created by falling seed. These features are not specifically consid- ered when engineers design equipment to rapidly move large volumes of commodity grains. Their focus is on capacity. Solidworks modeling is a computer program we use to simplify the process of designing and building our products as we transform our seedsmanship ideas into your products. This helps us design and manufacture all the components that go into making a properly fitted machine or conveyor. We apply the same principles to our design of the edible food products we work with. Using our practical farm experience along with our basic senses of sight, sound and touch helps guide our direction as we evaluate and test our equipment. “If it sounds like you are making meal, you probably are,” is some- thing I say a lot. Many of our products are manufactured right outside of my office door. We design and build the seedsman- ship that goes into our products in our Des Moines, Iowa, facility. Our value proposition is that our prod- ucts and solutions are better by design. They fit the realities of our market and save you money on both the products and the installation. While sales are what support our business, we also do a whole lot of advising clients on how to make their situations better. Advice, effort, energy, attitude and passion “don’t cost extra,” but they pay off for us and our customers in the long run as we strive to bring seedsmanship to our products. Putting Seedsmanship Into Seed Handling Equipment ROBIN O’MARA, O’MARA AG SERVICES PRESIDENT Romara60@msn.com • omara-ag.com HOW MUCH BETTER can we get in how we process seeds? We already sort and sift seed by weight, density, length, width, shape and color. How much better can we get? Where is there room for improvement? The opportunity for inno- vation is not in what we do, but in how we do it. Petkus Innovation Manager Dr. Khaled Raed says machines in the total process have to get much smarter and collect data that can be used to inform management decisions. Except for minor, incremental enhancements, most seed processing equipment in operation today is little changed from what it was 50 years ago. We don’t know anything more about the seed coming out of a conditioning tower until a sample has been examined in a seed testing lab. Then, it’s too late to find out that something needs to be changed. Smarter equipment will provide transparency with real time data to make changes and improve quality as the seed goes through the conditioning process. Smarter machines will provide real time data that can be collected, analyzed, reformed and sent to stake- holders so that they know with transpar- ency what needs to be done. The most immediate opportunity for enhanced equipment is smart color sorters. Sensing technology exists to collect data that can be processed to enable managers to make downstream There Is Still Room at the Top for Seed Processing Innovation JON MORELAND PETKUS NORTH AMERICA MANAGING DIRECTOR moreland@petkus.de • petkus.de decisions. For example, a smart color sorter could examine seed corn and determine the ratio of flats versus rounds in each seed lot, perhaps even before the seed goes into the dryer. Having this information early in the selling season would be extremely valuable to sales and marketing managers. To enhance the development of smart machines, Petkus has created a joint venture and formed a software company called Petkus Process Automation. With this technology, data can be collected, analyzed, reformed and sent to the stake- holders so that they know with transpar- ency what is being done with their seed as it moves through the conditioning process.