Cleaning flax

We have just finished cleaning the flax in the warehouse. This is our second season cleaning flax, and we are getting much better at it. Last year we cleaned about 6000 pounds for a small farm near Junction City. Since our system is designed for large amounts of seed, it was difficult to get the flax as clean as we would have liked. This year we were much better prepared, but we still had issues such as screen placement, machine speeds, air flow speed, etc. We had to tweak and re-tweak the setting many times to finally get it right. We had a lot of help from the Cimbria rep. (Cimbria is the manufacturer of our main cleaner). We were able to minimize our seed loss to the point that we only had about 2-3,000 pounds of screenings out of 16-18,000 pounds of seed. Which isn't bad considering the screenings from flax are worth several hundred dollars a ton to poultry farmers. Flax screenings make valuable feed additions to chickens for the omega-3 content. Although we got the flax very close to retail-ready, it will still have to be re-cleaned on a gravity table as there is a small amount of weed seed remaining. Kudos to Bill our warehouse manager for being so persistent in going after high quality. Nice work Bill!