Hannaford Seed Graders—The Mobile Fleet
Introduction
Since the early 20th century Hannaford, founded in 1915 by farmer and inventor Alf Hannaford, has been synonymous with broad acre farming across Australia.
To this day, Hannaford continues to promote Alf’s original values of innovation and dedication to customer service in producing equipment which is highly effective, clean and extremely versatile.
Hannaford seed treatment truck
Hannaford's fleet of over sixty mobile seed processors, are continually enhanced to the latest standards and technologies by our own design and engineering teams. It is also their goal to continue to create the very latest equipment innovations, maintaining Hannaford at the forefront well into the future.
All Hannaford mobile seed processors are operated by fully trained and experienced Hannaford franchisees and supported by an engineering team committed to assisting franchisees achieve excellence.
What does a Hannaford mobile seed processor do?
Grain held over from harvest for next years sowing, will contain varying degrees of chaff, husks, straw, weed seeds, inert material as well as small and cracked grain.
The objectives of Hannaford seed processing is to:
- Remove all the foreign material
- Evenly size the seed for viability and even sowing
- Evenly treat the seed with a fungicide seed treatment with the correct application dose rate
Supaflo seed treater
How does a Hannaford mobile seed processor achieve these objectives?
All Hannaford seed processors working across Australia have the same separation and treating capabilities, and incorporate the following five steps:
- Grain is threshed to remove whitecoats in wheat and awns in barley. The thresher can be adjusted to a soft thresh or bypassed by the operator when processing legumes.
- Air separation occurs at two places on the Hannaford processor. The principal is to run a curtain of grain over a flow of air blowing the lighter material into a settling chamber and sending the clean grain onto the next process.
- Foreign seeds and longer material such as straws are next removed through indented cylinders. The 'indents' work on centrifugal force by picking up the grain in the cylinder pockets and depositing into an internal auger and rejecting all longer material. The indented cylinders are critical to the cleaning aspect of seed processing and dictate at what capacity a given sample may be processed effectively.
- Screening is the final separation tool used in the process and is very important to discarding the small and cracked seed which will not be viable in the paddock.
- The fully graded and cleaned seed now is weighed and treated through the Hannaford developed 'Flow Through' treater.
Operators have the option to adjust all these processes and where there is a discernible difference in length, width or weight the Hannaford equipment is designed to give customers high quality results from fair average quality samples.
Megaflo seed treater
