Report of Supervisors' Meeting. 443 



screen, and the very fine dirt, dust, etc., passes through the screen, 

 and the winged seeds remain in the fanning mill. They are, you 

 might say, cleaned winged seed, that is, seed with the wings on. 

 In running a fanning mill, I find the light seeds are blown out of 

 the mill. The heavy seeds stay in it, which to a certain extent 

 reduces the necessity of water floating to get the light seed out. 

 The light seeds are not fertile. They are small seeds with a 

 wing, and a very small kernel of no value at all. After the seeds 

 are first fanned that way, they are put in what is called the wet 

 box. Water is poured over them, then the seeds are stirred up 

 until thoroughly moist; after that they are placed on a second 

 screen, which is sufficiently large to allow all seed to go through 

 by rubbing. The second screen is horizontal. A quantity of 

 moist seed is placed on there and rubbed; that loosens all the 

 wings from the seed. I might state here that we are 

 experimenting with the view of possibly doing away with the 

 rubbing or second handling. I found from one of our experi- 

 ments that it is not necessary to rub these seeds over the screen. 

 I think it is sufficient to moisten them and dry them. You might 

 not get as clean seed, but it will be clean enough for all practi- 

 cal purposes. By wetting them and getting them dry, you can 

 get the wings from the seed by simply running them through the 

 fanning mill. After the seeds have been wet, they are dried by 

 placing them on sheets in the sun, which requires from two to 

 four hours. Now we dry them in our cylinder, which is covered 

 with window screen set before the furnace. We put about 100 

 pounds in the cylinder and set it up before the furnace, and 

 rotate it a few minutes. We dry in one night 400 pounds of seed. 

 This makes four different dryings, but they are not wet any great 

 length of time and not very wet at all. 



The first furnace we used was simply a big boxwood stove that 

 had a cement floor underneath it, and outside of the stove we 

 built a wall of fire-brick, put a lot of cement over this, and allowed 

 an opening in the top to go through into the bottom of the drying 

 . room on the same principle as any hot air furnace. From the 

 bottom of the floor, we had cold air pipes which lead into this air 

 chamber around the boxwood stove. I found the boxwood stove 

 would not stand the heat for the length of time required, and I 

 have since built a furnace of fire-brick on exactly the same princi- 

 ple as I used in the boxwood stove. We have a great many 



