From Field to Elevator: Streamlining Grain Quality Assessment

Grain quality assessment is essential throughout every stage of the supply chain, from pre-farm to field and harvest, through to storage and processing, transportation, and retail. Its prominence in the grain industry means that any steps that can be taken to streamline and speed up the process have positive repercussions in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and cost.

New near-infrared spectrometry technology embedded in handheld, robust devices that give instant results, like the SCIO Cup and SCIO Mini, have opened up new doors for what is possible when it comes to streamlining grain quality assessment

Accuracy in the Grain Supply Chain

Precision is important in the grain industry, especially when it comes to the grains themselves. The nature of the grain, the quality of the grain, the material composition of the grain and more are all factors that impact how it should be treated, what its value will be, and how best to optimize the whole process. 

It’s a challenge that affects every aspect of the supply chain, and mistakes in one part can also cause difficulties downstream, making it even more important to get it right. Maintaining trusting collaborative relationships between suppliers and companies at all stages in the industry is essential to good business performance, and ensuring reliable grain quality assessment is a key part of that. 

No matter where your company sits in the grain supply chain, you’ll be concerned about the quality of the grains. For example:

• Seed companies. The quality of the seeds is all-important to the success of the resulting crops. Being able to measure and monitor the moisture, protein, oil, and more contained in a seed is essential not just for the knowledge of those seeds but also for effective planning for the future.
• In the field. Knowing when to fertilize or otherwise manage your fields is best done on the basis of the status of the crops growing in them. 
• Harvest. Timing is everything when it comes to grain harvests. Measuring the moisture level is especially important. Get it wrong, and crops can be too fragile, dry, or brittle – or, alternatively, at risk of spoiling or mold. 
• Elevators. When it comes to sorting, drying, buying, selling, or trading grain, knowing what you’ve got in front of you is key. Making data-backed decisions requires grain elevators and co-ops to have the right data – and that means accurate grain assessment. 
• Storage. Misassessment of grains for storage can cause a multitude of problems, from spoilage to confusion over which type of grains are where, what quality they are, and what use is most appropriate for them. 
• Transportation. Transporting grains safely and efficiently also relies on an understanding of the composition of the grains. Depending on their type, purpose, and moisture content, they may require different treatments. 
• Retail. As grains near the end consumer, it’s essential to have confidence that the right grains are being used for the right products and purposes. Getting it wrong has health, trust, regulatory, and quality risks.

For many companies in the grain industry, being able to accurately assess grain quality is a day-to-day essential data-gathering exercise. Important doesn’t always mean easy, however, and since it’s such a widely needed process, efforts that successfully streamline the process can have significant operational and cost benefits.

SCIO’s Grain Clibration Offering:

The Problem

Traditional methods of assessing grain quality are anything but streamlined. You might even think of them as the opposite of a portable grain moisture meter. Laboratory-dependent processes involve taking destructive samples of the grain, transporting them to a lab, treating them to make them ready for analysis, examining them with expensive equipment that requires training and expertise to operate, and often having to enter, upload, or update the results manually. 

The result of all this is a delay, higher costs, and an understandable unwillingness to take large numbers of samples – which in turn means that although the accuracy of any single analysis may be high, the probability of the samples taken being a good representation of the grains in question is lower than ideal.

Despite all of these issues, for a long time, the laboratory-dependent method was the only one available. Having any kind of fairly accurate grain moisture meter or moisture meter for corn is better than none, even if the process it entails is full of friction. 

SCIO Streamlines Grain Quality Assessment

SCIO’s new approach to grain quality assessment combines the technological sophistication of the lab with the focus on streamlined operations that grains companies expect elsewhere in their processes. 

SCIO’s handheld devices mean that anyone, anywhere, from field to elevator, can have a portable grain analyzer at their fingertips. The devices need absolutely no special training to use, deliver accurate results in seconds, and are non-destructive, meaning that companies can finally take as many samples as they need, at any point in the supply chain. 

Embracing the advantages of near-infrared spectrometry makes it easier to avoid operator errors and provides confidence at all levels that the quality of the grains matches expectations and leads to the correct treatment required for the grains. 

When you need a grain moisture meter, an easy way of measuring oil and protein content, or a way to segregate reliably between regular and specialty crops, there’s simply no better solution than one that’s portable, robust, agile, and gives accurate real-time results that sync to your other existing systems and processes.

Benefits For the Entire Supply Chain

As Neal Campbel, Production Agronomy Manager at Beck’s, put it: “With SCIO… more testing, requiring fewer people, with more accurate data, meant we began making faster and smarter decisions.
That led to more accurate spraying and harvest schedules, less waste, and ultimately a better product.”

This comment conveys an aspect of accurate, instant grain quality assessment at scale that is often underappreciated. Since establishing grain quality is so essential to so many parts of the grain industry and embedded in so many processes, making it faster, easier, and available to anyone as an integral part of existing systems doesn’t just make the task of assessment easier. It has a positive knock-on impact as well.

Once grain quality assessment can be quick, reliable, and instant, it can be undertaken more frequently, increasing the precision of the organization’s understanding of its grains and the predictability of the output. Fewer mistakes, misunderstandings, and misestimations save effort and time on many levels and enable the organization to focus on its core mission instead of on corrections or unexpected calibrations. 

Streamlining grain quality assessment is well worth doing – especially when it can be done with little effort and can result in better insights, smoother company processes, and lower costs.