Lotivka Elit Seed Plant

Svarog West Group built the Lotivka Elit seed plant both for its own purposes and for providing services to its customers. The facility was launched seven years ago. Director of the plant Petro Harus confirmed the today's market trend: not only large and medium-sized players, but also small farms are interested in quality seeds. Latifundist.com team went to Khmelnytsky region to study seed production in greater detail.

From the head office of Svarog West Group in Shepetivka, we drove another 30 km to Lotivka, where the dairy complex and seed plant of the company are located. As Petro Harus told, Lotivka Elit was built literally in the field. On the territory of the current seed plant, there was a destroyed pig farm and a dump of construction waste.

It took only five months to clean up and construct the plant. And in October 2012, the company started receiving grain. A modern complex for storage, treatment and transportation of seeds is equipped with the machinery by Danish company Cimbria. The enterprise's production capacity is 10-15 tons of seeds per hour. By working in three shifts, the plant produces 25 thou. t of seeds annually.

An important feature of the complex is that it also houses a niche crops after-treatment workshop launched in 2015. Thus, taking into account the two production sites, 12 people are working the shift at the enterprise. It is the number of employees that is required to manage the production processes of the entire complex.

The largest seed plant in Western Ukraine produces wheat, barley, soybean, peas, beans, pumpkin seeds. These are actually the basic crops in the crop rotation system of Svarog West Group. The enterprise equipment allows also to carry out the after-treatment of flax and buckwheat seeds.

The production process at the seed plant starts with the receiving station. Grain trucks arrive at the enterprise from the southern and central branches of the company.

A loaded truck moves onto the scale. While the raw material is weighed, the metal tube of the pneumatic sampler is immersed into the contents of the truck body pulling in the grain from different parts of it like a vacuum cleaner. The required amount of raw materials is taken for the sample, which is checked in the production laboratory within 5-10 min. on such parameters as humidity, dockage and, if necessary, GMO presence.

The laboratory checks both incoming raw materials and shipped products. In addition, it performs several analyses in the process of seed production. In the course of further treatment, the seeds are also tested for germinating energy (how evenly the seeds will emerge in the field) and viability.

Once an express analysis of the raw materials delivered at the enterprise is made, the truck is unloaded. The intake pit holds 60-70 t of grain, i.e. three trucks of raw materials can be unloaded simultaneously. The convenience for trucks consists in the fact that the pit is designed for both vertical and horizontal grain unloading.

On the territory of the enterprise near the production workshop, there is a gas grain-dryer of the English company Perry. If the harvesting season is rainy, drying facilitates preparation of the grain for further treatment. The shaft dryer is permeated with air channels, where air passes through the grain from channel to channel.

There is a silo near the dryer for the operative storage of grain. The point is that the grain for the production of seeds must be dried gradually, one cannot immediately air a high percentage of humidity. Petro Harus mentioned that the company plans to install 18 more silos (8 of 500 tons and 10 of 150 tons each) to have more containers for storing different crops and varieties.

The plant has eight ventilated silos of 500 tons each. These are silos for storing different types of grain for seed production. With regard to silos and floor storage, the facility's storage capacity is 10-12 thou. t of grain.

The operator's room is located at the entrance to the plant. It is a compact room where the enterprise management centre is located. With the help of two computers, the operator can start or halt the production process. The main computer screen shows all the process links from the intake pit to the treatment machine. If a problem occurs in a particular area, the system signals a red icon on the monitor. There are also indicators on the screen demonstrating the load and temperature of each silo. Granaries are equipped with seven sensors to measure the temperature in different parts of it.

All grain received by the enterprise undergoes the so-called coarse cleaning. From the intake pit, the raw material is fed into the workshop by two transporters to a height of 12 m to the first cleaning machine where coarse impurities and dust are removed. The capacity of the coarse cleaning machine is 30 tons of grain per hour.

The high capacity of the first machine is conditioned by the fact that all the grain delivered to the enterprise for storage and for seed production passes through it. After coarse cleaning, the grain to be stored is loaded into the silos and the grain for seed production proceeds to further cleaning.

The secondary grain cleaning unit with a capacity of 10 tons per hour performs a more thorough removing of impurities. To ensure delicate cleaning, the machine is equipped with sieves featuring holes of appropriate dimensions, which are set based on the weight of a thousand seeds. By the way, as a result of grain cleaning, different categories of waste are produced. Category 2 waste is essentially a by-product, i.e. a smaller grain used for animal feed production. The third category of waste is "dead" and it is recycled.

After the secondary cleaning, the noria delivers the seeds to the indented unit. This area is only used for grain crops. Indented separators sort grain by length and remove unwanted short and long impurities. The indent unit is a rotating cylinder, the inner surface of which has special indents for precise sorting of raw materials by length.

The grains that fit the indents rise upwards and driven by their own mass fall out of the indents into the chute, from which they are unloaded by the screw. Longer impurities that do not fit in the indents slide down and remain in the cylinder body. They move to the outlet where they are discharged into the receiver.

In the next stage, the grain is passing through the gravity separator. The name of the unit speaks for itself. The seeds are sorted by weight on the vibrating table. Although grains may look the same, the weight of every single one can differ. Lighter, empty grains roll from the table in separate chutes into the waste. And the dense seeds get on the conveyor belt and are sent for further treatment.

The pretreatment workshop is responsible for the treatment of grain to protect it from pests and diseases. The treatment solution used to treat seeds is prepared according to the recipes of the agronomic service. At the enterprise, two tanks of 400 liters each are used for a treatment solution storage. However, customers can bring their own chemicals for treatment.

The pretreatment machine is a tank with a large metal plate inside spraying the solution onto the seeds. The machine can treat up to 150 kg of products at a time. The process takes only 10-15 seconds. Actually, the whole process is programmed on the electronic board of the unit: the time of solution application per portion, the volume of solution and seeds.

Since the plant produces seeds of different crops, all equipment is cleaned after each variety. In order to prevent grain from the previous batch, the first two tons of the new crop are marketable grain, and the rest — seeds.

Some seeds, such as pumpkins, are sorted on an optical sorting machine Scan Master (Japan). It is a monochrome photo separator that sorts grains by contrast. In particular, when it comes to pumpkin seeds, it separates white and dark green seeds.

There are eight chutes in the photo separator by which the grain illuminated by lamps moves. In front of the chutes, there are special photocells. If the device detects the emergence of a white product, the injectors are triggered to sort out these seeds with the airflow. The machine looks very carefully at each seed: it takes approximately two hours to examine one ton of raw material and to sort it.

The final technological step is seeds packing. Similarly to the previous machines, the capacity of the filling line is 8-10 tons of seeds per hour. In this section, electronic scales fix the set volume of produce, filling a bag or a big-bag of 300, 500, 700 kg or 1 ton. Seeds can also be packed in small bags of 10 to 50 kg. Both automatic and semi-automatic bag closing machines are installed at the plant.

Packed products are transported to warehouses or shipped for sale. The company has two warehouses with a capacity of 1.5-2 thou. t each. Polished concrete floors in the buildings protect the produce from moisture. If there is dew on the storage ceiling as a result of the temperature difference, droplets flow into special troughs. The sloping roof shape prevents moisture from reaching the product.

Commissioned in 2015 niche crops treatment workshop at Lotivka Elit started operating at full capacity in 2016. The workshop mainly produces gymnosperm pumpkin seeds.

We were fortunate to observe the process of pumpkin seeds treatment.

Since pumpkin seeds are removed in the field, they arrive at the enterprise in a pasty form with the remains of pulp. Near the workshop, there are three intake reservoirs 10-12 tons each for receiving and primary treatment of pumpkin seeds.

The intake reservoir is filled with water from the well. On the control panel, the operator switches on the "barbotage" mode, and strong airflows make the reservoir contents bobble. Seeds "soak in the Jacuzzi" for 40 min. to wash away mucus, herbage and other impurities.

After that, powerful pumps installed under the intake reservoirs send seeds through pipes to the workshop for the next washing section. There are two drum washers in the room with a recirculation machine in between. The cake is separated into a special container, and water is sent back to the intake reservoir for re-use in order to save money.

Washed seeds are filled in 800 kg containers and are left to settle for a certain period of time. In fact, the containers are like large sieves as the bottom of each is net-like allowing the remains of water flow down.

The seeds are then unloaded onto the drying tables. There are four of them in the workshop. Each table is 12 m long and 3 m wide. Up to 8-10 tons of wet seeds are placed on one table. The workers distribute seeds evenly over the entire table length. Then a set of screws gently mixes the seeds moving slowly over the table.

The drying table is designed so that hot air is fed from below. It is produced by the boilers based in the niche crops treatment workshop. The facility is equipped with four pellet boilers and two gas ones. Using pellet boilers is also more profitable since the company produces its own fuel.

If the workshop produces pumpkin seeds for the confectionery industry, pumpkin oil production, etc., then 8-10 tons of wet seeds are dried for an average of 12-15 hours at a temperature of 65 ºC. If the raw materials are used for seed production, the average drying temperature is 30-35 ºC so that the seeds preserve their quality, germinate and emerge well.

During the entire drying period, the laboratory technician takes samples of the seeds at an hour interval and checks the degree of drying. The seeds are dried to 7-8% humidity. That is, it takes one ton of wet seeds to produce up to 300-400 kg of dry ones depending on the variety, purity and crop yield. In total, the shop provides for the drying of 50-60 tons of raw materials per day.

Seeds dried to the required condition are fed to the conveyor at the end of the drying table, which then delivers them into the silo. The seeds are transported from the silo to the coarse-cleaning machine which sorts out large impurities. As Petro Harus explained, it is crucial to harvest pumpkin before the frost hits, otherwise a large amount of pumpkin rind softened by the frost goes with the seeds for processing.

After cleaning, the seeds are collected in a storage bunker and then fed to a sorting machine (Elika, Bulgaria), which calibrates the raw materials by size. Pumpkin seeds are then sorted by colour in a Scan Master monochrome photo separator in the workshop of the seed production plant. If pumpkin seeds are not intended for organic production in the future, they are also treated at the plant. Finished products are packed in bags and big-bags, then transported to the warehouse.

Having contemplated the inside of the seed production process, one is convinced once again that it is impossible to get high-quality seeds without a comprehensive multi-stage selection. Encouragingly, the more and more Ukrainian agricultural producers come to such conclusions.