Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Chocolate chip cookie dough with maybe a dose of red food coloring. Or perhaps red peanut brittle. That’s what the chunks in Jeff’s bag of soybean seed looked like. “It doesn’t want to plant,” he said. “It leads to skips in the field and that leads to unhappy customers. I want my seeds to look like marbles or magical mystery beans.”
Whether from a continuous drum or batch type seed treater or an upstream or downstream treatment application, everyone wants a seed treatment solution that will finish the seed well without making cookie dough chunks. Even though today’s seed treatments can do some fantastic things for the seed, with ever-increasing slurry rates, seed treatments can cause major grief when freshly treated seed gets tacky and accumulates chaff from within the seed handling equipment to create those undesirable chunks. It is no mystery that the seed treating process needs time, air, heat, additives, or some combination of these for a post-treatment handling solution that retains the ability to separate and remove the chunks.
Jeff’s answer to eliminating cookie dough chunks is a fluidized bed dryer, the best post-treatment drying solution we have. This machine can accept wet seed directly from a treater. It uses a gentle, fluidizing action along with high air-flow rates to singulate, separate, and dry wet seed. This is especially important during the “tack phase” of treated seed. The fluidized bed produces a smooth, uniform finish that results in improved seed flowability, more uniform plantability, reduced equipment cleanup, less treatment transfer to bins and pipes, less dust-off and reduced clumping and bridging in bins and bags.
How about bags that will stack more neatly and stay that way when the seed inside is more flowable, more uniform, and dry? Adding a discharge-end scalping screen can assure that chunks that may have developed during treating can be removed before packaging. Not everyone needs it, but the addition of heat can further improve the bed’s drying ability by expanding the air’s capacity to take away moisture.
If you want your beans to look like magical mystery beans, a post-treatment fluidized bed dryer may be the solution for you.
