Pakistan Newspaper on Science, Technology, Engineering, Innovation

Seed as it comes from the field is never pure. It usually arrives at the cleaning plant containing large quantities of trash, green leaves, weeds, other crop seeds, and insects. If it contains such materials as green leaves and other high-moisture materials, it cannot be safely stored, efficiently handled, nor accurately seed conditioning until most of the foreign material has been removed.

The process of removing these unwanted materials from a seed lot is known as seed conditioning.

The seed conditioner has five objectives when cleaning seed:

Seeds can be separated by mechanical means only if they differ in some physical characteristic that can be detected by some mechanical or electrical process. Thus, the seed conditioner uses differences in physical characteristics of the seed crop being cleaned and those of seeds of other crops and weeds as well as inert matter.

Inert matter such as chaff, stems, and stones is usually the easiest to remove other crop seeds and weed seeds may be much more difficult, especially those similar in appearance and physical characteristics. Physical characteristics that are used to separate seeds are: size, length, width, thickness, shape, weight (specific gravity), surface texture, color, affinity for liquids, and electrical properties.

The seed conditioner should carefully analyze each seed lot as it comes from the field to determine what the conditioning problem will be and which machine or machines will do the best job. Since usually more than one machine must be used to completely condition a given seed lot to maximum purity and germination, their sequence of use is also important.

Several types of seed conditioning machines separate or upgrade seeds on the basis of thickness, length, or width.

Research Associate/Graduate Student, Seed Physiology Lab, Department of Agronomy, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.

Research Associate/Graduate Student, Seed Physiology Lab, Department of Agronomy, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.

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