Five Seeds Seed Cleaning gears up for the 2022 crop year

By Joan Janzen

For farmers gearing up for the 2022 crop year, Five Seeds Seed Cleaning in Eatonia is available to help. The seed cleaning plant is located south of Eatonia, a half-mile east of Highways 21 and 44.

The owner/operator Matt Stimson said his plant’s first cleaning season was in 2017. “A few of us farmers sat around one day. We noticed a lot of local business around the Eatonia area were headed off in another direction,” Matt explained. “So we thought we’d build a seed plant and get the local business back.” Previously, farmers headed to Eston and Acadia Valley to clean their seed.

“Typically, we usually start as early as we can in the fall. We can do a bit in August or September, which is really nice to do. It picks up in October and November, and December, January and February are quite busy,” Matt said. “Typically, we like to stay up and running as long as we can.”

One of the claims made by this seed plant is “We will try anything,” and they have proven this to be true. “I can clean almost anything,” Matt said. “We typically try to stay on one commodity for as long as we can. Within the commodities, we keep the varieties as separate as possible.

Within a month and a half, we could have up to eight different varieties of durum. We do a big clean between varieties and clean between growers to make sure there’s no contamination between growers.”

The plant is capable of cleaning 350 bushels in an hour; however, pulse crops can be cleaned at a rate of 250 bushels per hour. “For mustard, canary seed and flax, it’s about 100 bushels an hour,” Matt explained. “If there’s a specific weed seed in a grain, it can slow us down a bit, depending on what we’re trying to take out.”

According to Matt, getting the seed cleaned really helps when it is time to put that seed into the ground in the spring. “If you have too much chaff in your grain, it won’t flow through your seeder very well. We try to make it as pure as we can so it goes through the drill nicely,” Matt concluded.

Matt Stimson

Inside Five Seeds Seed Cleaning Plant at Eatonia