Stirling elevator is a large concrete

Concrete

Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

 grain terminal located three quarters of a mile north east of the town of Stirling, Alberta

Stirling, Alberta

Stirling is a village in the County of Warner No. 5, Alberta, Canada. The village is located on Highway 4, approximately southeast of Lethbridge and northwest of the United States-Canada border....

. The elevator stands 200 feet tall and is surrounded by grain fields that stretch out for hundreds of miles east, north and south.

The large elevator was built between 1998-1999 with a cost of $11 million and was one of the first elevators of its kind in the area. The elevator was built with a capacity of 17,500 metric tonnes (19,300 imperial tonnes) the elevator has a total of 150,000 metric tonnes (660 million lbs) a year, this could feed over 1.3 million people a year. Eighty percent of the local farmers grain that passes through the grain elevator is shipped overseas, feeding people all over the world.

The elevator may be a large building, but only requires a minimum of 6 people to maintain the elevator, due to the central computer system, making it possible to ship 5,000 tonnes in one day; loading train cars and unloading trucks both at the same time.

Seed cleaning rooms

Located on the east side of the elevator, the seed cleaner take up three floors. In one hour, 100 tonnes of wheat can be cleaned, at such a rate it takes the cleaner only 46 hours (4 days) to clean seed for 50 train cars. The seed cleaner doesn’t just separate all foreign matter from the grain; it also sorts the foreign matter into six different groupings. The seed cleaner has six refuse bins holding wild oats

Wild Oats

Wild Oats or wild oats may refer to:* Avena, a genus of grasses that includes the cereal oat* Chasmanthium latifolium or wild oats, a grass* Uvularia sessilifolia]] or wild oats, a bellwort* Wild Oats , a 1994 sitcom...

, salvage wheat

Wheat

Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...

, mixed grains, salvage canola

Canola

Canola refers to a cultivar of either Rapeseed or Field Mustard . Its seeds are used to produce edible oil suitable for consumption by humans and livestock. The oil is also suitable for use as biodiesel.Originally, Canola was bred naturally from rapeseed in Canada by Keith Downey and Baldur R...

, cracked kernels

Seed

A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

 and a small dust bin. Of the 55 tonnes of chaff

Chaff

Chaff is the dry, scaly protective casings of the seeds of cereal grain, or similar fine, dry, scaly plant material such as scaly parts of flowers, or finely chopped straw...

 sold annually, 2/3 of it is chaff and 1/3 of it is small seeds and cracked kernels. The materials separated out of the grain have a certain amount of revenue

Revenue

In business, revenue is income that a company receives from its normal business activities, usually from the sale of goods and services to customers. In many countries, such as the United Kingdom, revenue is referred to as turnover....

and are sold to the animal feed industry

The seed cleaner is a complicated piece of equipment completing a multiplicity of tasks. The material that is removed during the seed cleaning process is placed in the bins below the seed cleaner or is sucked up to the top of the elevator through the silver tubes. The clean grain is elevated back to the top of the elevator by a small leg. At the top of the elevator it is placed onto a paddle drag that deposits it into bins 2, 4, 12, 13, 27 or bin 28. The dust separator deposits the dust it collects into the chaff holding bin on the north side of the elevator. All the silver tubes in the three photos below are part of this scavenging system; removing the dust and chaff from the different parts of the seed cleaner. Altogether, the seed cleaner stretches over a height of 70 feet.

External links

• Stirling Elevator

Alberta°N date=December 2010°W