Satake Nirami at Ellingham Grain

SATAKE Corporation (UK) - As the industry is finding itself increasingly challenged by market, consumer and regulatory changes, and volatile weather leads to poor harvest results, the services of grain experts such as Ellingham Grain Store become ever more essential.

Over the last fifty years, Proprietor Anthony Smith has nurtured, developed and grown Ellingham Grain Store from a greenfield site to the industry respected business we know today. 

With two primary sectors to their business:  Pulse Exporters - Specialists in the production of top quality beans and peas for human consumption and Agricultural Merchants - grain trading, growing contracts, seed supplies, game cover, maize and small seeds and commercial store keepers. Their products, services and customers rely on the consistency of their high-quality equipment and processes.

Embracing new technology, new production processes and innovation is at the heart of their continued success and longevity. Working with local industry specialist Plot Feeds, their latest development, a new processing line, was completed in the Autumn of 2021. An integral part of the new line is Satake’s latest Optical Sorter - NIRAMI, the first to be installed in the UK. Ellingham’s Proprietor commented “We have worked with Satake for a long time and already have another Satake optical sorter, we knew we could trust that the NIRAMI would deliver high quality and ease of use but we were genuinely surprised and delighted by the results we have achieved since its installation. One example is the sort we have achieved removing ergot from malting barley, now many optical sorters can identify and reject ergot, but the NIRAMI went a step further and was able to reject grains with the pre-germination characteristic black spot, which only have approximately 20% viability in germination. On a recent bean sort, at a glance it looked like too much good product was being rejected, however, on inspection of the rejects we could see that NIRAMI was correctly identifying and rejecting beans with small weevil holes, the operator was so excited to see the results that he ran through to the lab to tell the other staff about it.”  

When asked about NIRAMI Vanessa Schofield, Senior Sales Manager for Satake Europe said “The Satake NIRAMI optical sorter is the first one of its’s kind to be installed in the UK making, Ellingham the launch site of this new technology. The NIRAMI efficiently removes impurities, diseased grains with darkened tips and other defects including immature and brokens. Different grains mixed in the field, harvest or storage which are similar in colour can also be efficiently separated by the NIRAMI optical sorter. The NIRAMI features, including shape recognition technology, infra-red cameras for foreign materials, full colour cameras to see even the slightest colour differences and high-quality ejectors, allow a wide variety of products to be sorted, from small seeds to large beans. The Satake 3S software installed on the user-friendly touch screen makes it quick and easy to set up a sort for new products and up to 50 pre-sets can be saved for future use.

As part of this latest plant development, Ellingham Grain Store have made additional special modifications to their traditional feed system, giving them the option to manually feed small batches into a dedicated holding bin creating the facility to sort smaller batches of specialist and high value products. Colonel Anthony Smith added “These modifications to the traditional feed system, coupled with the exceptional results we are achieving on the NIRAMI, give us the scope to continue to develop our traditional business and the opportunity to expand into new niche food markets”.

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