Inside Our Seed Facility: How We Mix 16 Million Pounds of Seed Per Year

0:00 Hello and welcome to green cover seed. My name is Keith Burns, I'm the co-owner and co-founder of green cover seed. And we really wish that you could be here for an in-person tour of our facility so that we could show you how we mix 16 million pounds of seed every year and chip 30 million pounds. But since you couldn't be here, we're going to do the next best thing and give you a video tour of the facilities, of the people, and some of the equipment that we use to accomplish all this.

0:24 So let's go ahead and get started and take a look at what we have to here at green cover seed. I want to start our tour here in the office where, as you know, in most businesses all the things really start in the office and then the folks that work in the office are really the ones that know everything that's going on and make things happen.

0:42 So Doris is working here. We do most of our work through a program called Fishbowl Inventory and Manufacturing. It allows us to keep track of all of our inventory. We've got multiple locations, we've got multiple buildings at those locations, so we need to know where all of the hundreds of pallets of seed that we have. We have to know where they're at, so Fishbowl keeps track of that for us. It also allows us the sales people to build mixes for the customer. We can put in there exactly what we want and then we can print out these nice reports that go out to the mix floor and then we'll go out to the next floor here in a little bit and they'll be following one of these.

1:19 But basically the sales team will make these. The office folks will get these printed and highlighted with all the shipping paperwork and then this becomes the recipe for the mix that the guys will work on out on the floor. So this particular one is going to New Mexico. This time of year, it's going to the south but there's there's about

1:42 15 different things in here so a really nice diverse mix that the guys will be working on for new mexico. We also ship a lot of this. We use multiple carriers and so the folks in the office are doing a lot of work with shipping, shipping paperwork and contacting customers and follow-up and things like that.

2:01 If you're fortunate enough to come to green cover seed and pick up your own seed we have a little hidden treasure here in the office that everybody who comes really likes. We have our cupboard of goodies and if you come and pick up your seed you can leave with some barbecue sauce or some dressing, sweet chili sauce. We've got all kinds of salsas, jams and jellies as well. So we give that out instead of hats because you can only wear one hat but you can always enjoy a good barbecue sauce or salad dressing.

2:31 This is our shop and maintenance area, very important. We have a lot of equipment, a lot of machines that run so the shop and maintenance are an integral part of our operation. Travis is in charge of this area and I'm going to let him explain what they do in this area.

2:44 Yeah, so we've got a lot going on in this shop right now and most of the year basically we are working on anything from our own semis, tractors. We have a farm also so we work on tractors, combine, a lot of miscellaneous stuff. Also in the background you can kind of see here everybody standing over there, we've started to do a lot more fabrication work in-house. So we are just whether it's repairs to our own facility or coming up with some new designs for things it's very helpful because we're able to do some of that stuff in-house as opposed to having to go out to do that. So yeah we have about four or five guys that work in the maintenance department.

3:27 I oversee it as far as scheduling things using some software and stuff for maintenance, but we also got a lot of things going on trying to work in the space we have. But it works out pretty good.

3:40 This is what we call our small mix area. We have all of our 120 different species that we sell available in these small tubs because we sell a lot of things on the internet or we have people that order for just one or two acres, and so we don't want to have to use our big tubs to seed for that. So we have everything in the small mix area.

4:00 We ship about 5,000 orders a year out this way either through internet sales or research plots or small things like that. So the gals that work in this area have this all nice and color-coded. It's very organized with all of the different tubs. They can just simply pull out the tub and they can scoop out a pound or two of the products that they need.

4:22 They have their own office area here so they can do all of their boxing and shipping and label printing. Shalise is over here. She's working on a mono order, which means it's not going to necessarily be mixed. It's just packaging small orders that somebody on the internet ordered and is going to be shipping this out in the USPS box.

4:41 They do have their own mixer here so they can do mixes 250 to 300 pounds at a time so they can mix this up and again box it up and ship it out. I send a lot of boxes out through USPS and also through FedEx, so it really helps take the pressure off the large mixing area when they're able to do all of these things here for the small orders.

5:04 This is our large mix area. This is where the bulk of our mixing happens. This is what we call our pro box room and it's labeled that because we have in these large pro boxes we have the majority of the products that we use every day in making our mixes. You'll be able to see we've got some

5:21 Guys with senses of humor here. They like to make funny labels, so this Kentucky Pride, Crimson Clover, they have the Kentucky Fried Chicken label, our alfalfa of course, and buckwheat from Little Rascals. So they have a lot of fun with that.

5:35 I'm going to introduce Glenn. He's one of our main mix guys here, and Glenn is going to share just a little bit about the process that he and his teammates follow when they're putting a mix together for a customer.

5:48 Sure, sure. I've got this order form here, and this is just what I work off of, similar to a recipe if you were in the kitchen. So I've got these amounts. This one was buckwheat. I needed 75 pounds and got that right on the nose there. After I'm finished here, I'll take it back to the blue mix room, and then I can demonstrate how the mixer runs back there.

6:08 How many boxes would you estimate in a really busy day? How many times do you go up and down with boxes? Easily over 100, a couple hundred, yeah, more like that. So lots of up and down and boxes on and off the shelves, yeah, definitely. And this Hyster is really smooth. I think it's our newest forklift that we have here. It's really nice to operate.

6:29 Only the best equipment for you. I appreciate that, yeah.

6:33 We have two main mixers here at Green Cover Seed. This is what we call the Green Mixer. It's the first mixer that we had. We kind of rescued it out of the old production facility about 30 miles from here. Hadn't been used in years. We cleaned it all up, fixed it up, and since then we've probably put 25 million pounds of seed through this little girl here. It is a very simple mixer. It's got paddles inside and it does a great job of mixing. We've got it set up to where we can just simply put a pro box up here, we dump it in the top, it mixes up.

7:04 And then we can dump it out the bottom. This is about the fourth location it's been at here at Green Cover Seed and each time it gets better and better. We've got really good ventilation now as you can see down here, we've got all kinds of sensors and lights that our guys have put on to make it better. We've got pneumatic gates for opening and shutting, we've got dust control here, we've got lights and everything.

7:28 We use this for doing mixes up to 5,000 pounds is what this will hold. We do have a liquid tank we can put liquid inoculants, liquid biological products on the seed right when we mix it. So fairly simple, straightforward mixer that's really served us well and still continues to be a main part of our mixing operation.

7:49 After running that green mixer for our first five years, we determined that it wasn't big enough and we had to have more equipment and the capacity to do more volume of mixing. So we built onto our building and we put in what we call the blue mixing system.

8:05 You can see that it's a horizontal—instead of going horizontal like a green mixer, this is a vertical mixer. Lots of equipment in here, lots of electronics, lots of controls. But basically we can bring the seed from the pro box room that the guys weighed out—Glenn has one setting up right here. They pull the gate and that goes down through that hopper, up through that leg and into the mixer over here.

8:29 We can also bring seed in from the outside, and I'll show you these tanks in just a little bit here. But what really gives us the efficiency and allows us to mix up to 250 to 300,000 pounds of seed today is the ability to pull in bulk seed from the outside. It comes into this other whey tank back behind there you may not be able to see.

8:49 It very well, but it also goes up this leg and into the mixer. Once the seed is mixed, and again we can apply both dry and liquid inoculants through that mixer there, it goes through the other leg and into this coating tank.

9:03 We can also flip a switch and we can send the mix to the outside. We have a bulk holding tank, so if a customer wants to get an entire mix and a semi bulk, we can shoot it outside and we don't have to deal with putting it in a coat or a bag.

9:17 But once we have it in the coating tank, we have a very sophisticated system here. The guys can hang a tote on the hooks, and then the controls they can plug in exactly how many pounds they want in a coat bag, hit a button and that happens automatically. It fills the bag to the appropriate amount, shuts it off, drops the tote down onto a pallet. The guys can take it away and start on the next one.

9:44 So the vast majority of what we send out the board does. And this hasn't really sped up the process of being able to package that. We send a decent amount of seed out the door these 50-pound sacks for people that either aren't able to handle the big tote bags or bulk seed, or their preference is just to have it in these 50-pound bags.

10:07 So to do that we bring the seed over to this bagging unit. It's not super high tech on this one, but we've got really good people that know how to run it. I've got three guys here that can bag seed just about as fast as any automated system that I've seen.

10:24 So it's very simple. We just dump the seed up in this tank. We've got a digital control scale head on it. It weighs out 50 pounds each time. They pull the lever, fill the bag, send it down the conveyor, sew it up, and then another guy stacks it on the pallet and they say.

10:41 It's not super fancy automated with skilled people running the operation, it can still be very effective. This is our blue mixer control room and it's really at the heart of the operations of this large mixing system.

10:55 Lots of automation, lots of computer programming went into putting this together. Josh runs the mixing operations here for us and he's going to explain a little bit about the custom software and the automation that we have in this system.

11:08 So this is the overview page of our bluemixer software. We have 12 bins outside on three conveyors that all lead to one that can come inside or outside for toting.

11:23 You can open this button and you can switch between mixes, which is inside in here and monos which would be outside. And then you can go to this page and enter in whatever, however many pounds you need, and the system will just bring it in for us.

11:40 Works pretty crazy like most the time, but when it works it works. And then on your other screen you also have the fishbowl software running that we looked at in the office. They use it on the back end here as well.

11:54 And then every mix that they do they have to pick the seeds that they use so that it keeps our inventory and our locations all correct.

12:03 What are all these buttons over here? Those just so if we need to run it manually without the help of the computer we can. When they're set to auto, which is to the top right like they are now, that means the computer is allowed to control them and then you can shut them off or open them manually.

12:18 So when the computer is turning it on and off the lights, the lights will come on so you know it's

14:05 And in a good day of mixing they'll probably fill one of these bags of dust every day. This all gets added to our compost pile because that dust has lots of nutrients in it as well. So we try to keep the environment as clean as possible for the guys, and by pulling as much dust out as we can it makes a better product for the customer as well.

14:23 Once we get all this seed mixed it has to go somewhere, so we've got a number of ways that we prepare stuff to be shipped out. Obviously some of it gets picked up by customers, but a lot of it has to be stored and ready for trucks that come and pick it up either full truckloads or less than truckloads. So we have a whole building over here that we can hold several semi loads of seed that's all packaged and ready to be shipped out.

14:48 We have additional space inside this main warehouse where we do that as well. We've got two truck docks here that are very busy during the busy time of the year with trucks coming and picking up seed to be taken out.

15:01 And then the last option that we have is when somebody wants it in bulk. This is the bulk tank that I mentioned earlier that we can flip a switch, and out of that blue mixer we can come right into this bulk tank. This can hold up to a semi load of seed. The semi just pulls under this conveyor, we flip it on, we load them up and away they go ready to go into their planter and go into the ground and do its job.

15:24 This is the inside of what we call our mono toting building, and this is where we can fill tote bags full of just one product. It doesn't go through the mixer. So as I showed you before we can reverse the conveyor coming out of those 12 meridian bins and it comes right into this tank right here, and then from this tank the guys have a scale. They've got not quite as sophisticated as the toting system that we had inside.

15:48 But some similar automation they can program in how much they want, turn the crank and the seat comes out. When it gets to the right amount they shut it off, put it on a pallet, all the way and get the next one. So this has really increased our capacity to be able to meet the needs of those customers without slowing down the mixing operations inside.

16:10 When you ship out 30 million pounds of seed a year you have to have the capacity to clean a lot of seed because we grow some of it ourselves and we contract a lot of it to be grown from other growers from about 15 different states. And so this is our cleaning operation because when you contract your grown you have to be able to clean it yourself. So Jared is our main seed cleaner and I'm going to let Jared just explain some of the equipment that he uses back here because I don't even know how to run most of it, so Jared.

16:41 Well we got a key stage cleaner up here. We just use a combination of different screen sizes and air to help sort out and sift out the trash and everything that we don't want to be in there. Then after a run sort of cleaner come through the table we can separate the good seed from the fat seed.

17:01 And Jared, my understanding is that the gravity table separates based on density. So yeah, so the heavier seed is typically the better stuff, yes. And the lighter stuff is not as good and it separates based on density, whereas the screen cleaner separates the size. Yes, correct. So we have two different ways of separating the seed.

17:20 Then where does it go after it goes off the gravity? Here the clean seed that comes off the table and go out there where we can use it for backing up and for orders and everything. And the seat that comes off the low side of the table, that bad seat per se, that all gets recycled and gets re-cleaned to try to get as much of that out there as we can. This here's our

17:46 Phrase of the whole automation that we have going here. You can monitor every different aspect of the cleaner off of the screen here, and then we can make our minute adjustments with the knobs and the switches over here on this panel. But this has been a godsend for us. This has been real nice as far as keeping an eye on things, making sure if you have a breakdown, you know right where it gets started.

18:12 With all the bulk grain storage that we have here, it's very important that everybody understands what is stored where. I've got a lot of different bins, and so probably three different places throughout the company we have charts like this. Where it shows a physical layout of the green bins, and then they're able to write in here what product is in there. It's color coded as to what is dirty grain, what's clean grain, what belongs to the farm. So we've got some bins here, and then we've got another sheet here. So I think all together we have 55 or 60 different grain bins that we're trying to keep track of. So it's very important to have these visual management tools to make sure that everybody's on the same page knowing what we have stored where.

18:54 In addition to the 12,500 bushel Meridian bins and the 15,600 bushel P bins, we also have these eaten bins which hold 20,000 bushels, and we have some Sukup bins that hold 30,000 bushels. Very important for holding the bulk grain. Most of the products that are in there are waiting to be cleaned, or some of it belongs to our farming operation. And a lot of times we'll have farm grain in it for a while, then we'll try to get that cleaned out and bring cover crop seed in. So our bin complex is very important in order to handle the volume of seed that.

19:30 We're pushing through this plant. All right, with all of the seed that we mix, we have to bring that in from somewhere and we have to have a place to store it, so we've got four big storage warehouses similar to this, where we have our seed that we bring in. That is not the bulk seed that we looked at in the other bins, but this is one of our storage warehouses. This is Doug. He is in charge of our warehouses and keeping everything straight, and this is Gabby the mouser cat that is in charge of mouse patrol as well. So I'm going to let Doug talk a little bit about what they do out here in the warehouses.

20:04 Well, actually we just keep things separated at this point. We're winterizing right now. We have like four warehouses, three are here and one. We keep things that we know they're going to use in the next few months or something like that, and then also some legumes and that sort of thing over there. This warehouse in particular is for grasses and it's probably the tightest warehouse we have. That seems to be what mice go after. And of course the other next warehouse is brassicas, which is things mice do not like, and so that's like turnips and collards and that sort of thing.

20:46 The warehouse is broken down into five sections with five rows, and you can see up on the top how that's listed in our inventory system. Each row is documented as to what is in each row. This gets switched around a lot so the drivers have tablets where they can move things as they take them. And if they move to a different row, they can adjust that as well.

21:10 And Doug, when you're talking about moving things, you're talking about inside the Fishbowl software? Yeah, which I introduced earlier. So if I'm looking for, say, 2124H sorghum, I get on the computer and hopefully it says that it's in WS1D, and I can drive immediately to where it's at. Yeah, it sort of speeds things up. Yeah, as long as everybody's diligent about when you physically move it, you move it in the computer as well.