Seed Cleaning with Winnow Wizard

It truly is difficult to overstate the importance of seeds to human societies. So as a farmer who plants a lot of seeds I also am keen on harvesting my own. The complexity tends to come when you want to turn a harvest into more or less pure seed that can be replanted. I have some experience with this from being in the Willamette Valley and having some history with the very large seed cleaners in the area. But more recently I have been learning to use the famous Winnow Wizard (luterra.com/winnow-wizard/), developed here in Corvallis, Oregon and it is a technology very intuitive and especially useful for farmers at a modest scale, like myself.
Here's a quick primer on how this works. After harvest you probably need to thresh the bulky material that is stems, leaves, and parts of the mature fruits that enclose the seeds. This creates a mixture of materials with differential shapes and densities. Using screens that select for different sizes you can narrow down the bulk of what is left that includes seeds.
The Winnow Wizard works by creating a very consistent flow of air and then the material is dropped into this air column. Differences in density (aka specific gravity) come into play and usually the seeds drop faster than the lighter material in your mixture. Also, you could have material with the same density but different shapes and these could differ in how they are captured and moved by airflow.
The video shows me cleaning cilantro seed, which is also known as the spice coriander, as well as a dry pinto type bean known as Whipple. We have used this machine for many kinds of seeds, and I am a bit smitten by it.
#seedcleaning #winnowwizard

[@jimkaneko1692]

Awesome video. Keep those videos coming.

[@SolCycleFarm]

Will do! I know how much you want them. Will you consider horse farming please?

[@jimkaneko1692]

@@SolCycleFarm
Instead of horses consider oxen. They are more docile, can pull a ton of shit, and it is easier to train people to handle them. An added benefit is you can eat them if they don’t cooperate.

[@SolCycleFarm]

@@jimkaneko1692 Good idea. They don't turn around easily so you end up having very long fields.