After the tour of the seed cleaning plant we went to a nearby park to eat our lunches. And to feed the ducks and geese.

Click on thumbnails to see a larger copy.

The kids had great fun feeding and watching them.

It was great weather and a wonderful time!

The group went on to tour a food processing plant but no cameras were allowed inside so there are no photos of it. Maybe there is a young (or youngish) person out there who would be willing to write in and tell us all about that tour.

A continuation of our field trip to a grass seed cleaning plant.

After walking through the seed cleaning area- and up and down three flights of stairs- we wandered over to where the seed is put into smaller bags for shipping.

After the seed is cleaned it is put into large bags. These bags hold about a ton of seed. There it waits until the test results come back. If there is too much weed seed or dirt in a batch then it is re-cleaned. It is much easier to empty out the large bags of seed than open a lot of small ones. If the batch tests clean then it is brought over to a machine that puts it into smaller bags.

The man is putting the bags on to be filled and oversees the machine sewing the 50 lb. bags shut. The bags then go up the blue elevator and onto a conveyor belt.

The bag is slid into this arm (blue and white thing) which stacks the bags, in an alternating pattern, onto a pallet. Once the pallet is full, it drops down to where it is wrapped in shrink wrap in preparation to be shipped.

At the end, all the children were allowed to fill bags with seed to take home.

We had a great time learning about cleaning seed. But the day was not over yet! We went to a park to enjoy our lunch. I’ll be posting photos of that later!

We went on a field trip to see how grass seed is cleaned.

This very nice, funny and informative man took us on a tour.

(Click on thumbnails to enlarge. The thumbnail tends to cut off some of the photo.)

The dirty, right out of the field, seed is put into large storage rooms. Here the kids are feeling it.

These are screens that the seed goes over in one of the processes to clean it. The seed must meet certain standards- I believe it has to be 98% clean – before it can be sold. Every batch is tested before it’s bagged.

On the second of three floors we saw some seed going over a screen.

On the top (third) floor we got to feel the insides and outsides of drums used to filter out the dirt.

Here he is explaining how this machine works.

We walked back down the three flights of stairs and went over to see how the seed is bagged. I’ll show those pictures another day. Stay tuned!