Counting Seed

Texas weather is so finicky. We’d gone quite a while without any rain –long enough that it became necessary to irrigate our fields –and then in one night, we got rains of biblical proportions. Luckily, the rain came before we really started harvesting, so it wasn’t crucial to get out into the field. Instead, we spent the next day in the lab catching up on other tasks that needed to get done. As we harvest, the plants will get processed and analyzed in a variety of ways. The biomass that is collected will be grinded down into a powder that is then scanned using a near-infrared scanner, which gives the composition of the sample. The panicles are threshed to separate the seed from the stem and are then packaged and stored from for the next planting (I’ll go into greater detail about these processes in my next post).

The seed counter

 

I myself was counting seed for a graduate student. It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds! We have a machine that makes counting by hand a thing of the past. The seed counter has a bowl with an inclined plane that winds around the inside. The bowl vibrates which works the seed up around the inclined plane and into a chute from which the seed is counted and then falls into an envelope at the bottom. It’s a nifty contraption because it can be set to only allow a certain amount of seed to drop into each envelope. It’s simple, but the seed counter saves a lot of time!

Check back soon to see what we’ll be getting up to in the next few weeks. We’ve already begun harvesting, but soon the load will increase exponentially as we work to harvest all the panicles that we placed bags on earlier in the season.