News Release

May 10, 2016

Japan Agricultural Cooperatives Complete the Nation’s Largest Grain Conditioning Facility in Memuro-cho

Supporting Japan’s Food with High Quality and Stable Supply

At the end of March, the nation’s largest conditioning facility for wheat and beans is set to be completed in Memuro-cho, Hokkaido. This state-of-the-art facility allows double the capacity for wheat when compared to the earlier facility along with high quality products.

High quality wheat, potato, sugar beet and beans are produced as main 4 crops in Memuro-cho, maintained by a well-balanced rotational cropping system.

Mr.Tsuji,representative director of JA Memuro

Recently the existing facility had begun to show its age and found difficulty maintaining stable quality.

Furthermore, its conditioning capacity faced limitations due to the increasing of each crop’s production amount. Wheat conditioning in particular required more than a month to process the required quantities even over a 24-hour operation. In such a case, bean conditioning may have had to wait for wheat conditioning to finish. This would affect delivery date, fixing production amount for each farmer and supporting aid.

Appearance of the facility

To resolve the problems, firstly a new wheat drying facility was constructed in 2000. Then a wheat and bean conditioning facility was envisioned linking with the existing facility. In 2014, the fiscal budget for the construction of the new conditioning facility was approved. Work started in March 2015, finally reaching completion by March 2016.

Inside the facility

This is the nation’s largest wheat and bean conditioning facility having 8-levels and 2,680 square meters of gross floor area in a steel structure. The capacity of wheat conditioning has increased twofold when compared to the original plant (72 t/h). Thus wheat conditioning can be completed more quickly and bean conditioning accelerated. Not only is there capacity gain, but also to minimize quality loss during poor weather the facility has been equipped with sorting machines able to detect low amylose wheat which become lower quality during rainfall in the harvest season, and also by use of sorting and separating machines using gravity, color, x-ray etc.

Bean Cleaner

The capacity for bean conditioning is the same as earlier (4.8 t/h), but product quality has been improved greatly. The core machine is the “Bean Cleaner” which removes dirt on the surface of the bean using tapioca starch. It is a highly efficient cleaner which can operate continuously at a maximum 2 t/h. Two-stage polishing (using both dry and wet methods) provides high quality product. This facility utilizes the “Bean Cleaner” in 2 lines. JA Memuro changed their thinking from supplying “agricultural commodity” to making and supplying “food products” - positively as well as making a consistent production system for high quality products.

Mr. Tsuji, who is the representative director of JA Memuro, said “we are only just at the start line, now we can work towards a variety of goals with this facility”, he also said “when making our next step, where machine replacement or new technology is demanded, we would like to utilize Satake technology”, big expectations of Satake’s technology, due to having had years of knowledge in the sorting and separating for grains.

* Please note descriptions in news releases are accurate as of the date of release and may differ from the most up-to-date information.