PLAINVIEW, Minn. —When the Zabel brothers started up their seed company 75-plus years ago, they probably never imagined that one of their descendants, Mike Zabel, would install a robot to help in the sacking process.
This is a far cry from the procedures practiced by brothers Arnold and Clarence Zabel decades ago. Back then, much of the work was done with man or tractor power. Farmers came to the farm near Plainview with wagons pulled by tractors to get the seed needed for the next season's crop or to bring the harvested seeds to sell back to the Zabel brothers.
Now, giant semi tractor-trailer rigs pull into the farmyard and Mike deftly loads pallets of seeds with a forklift.
The seed company focuses on small grains.
"Zabel Seeds is the second largest producer of oat seed in Southern Minnesota and largest producer of Royal barley in the world," according to its website.
The company produces and sells soybeans from Stine Seed company and perennial grasses, alfalfa and cover crops through its association with Legacy Seeds, Saddle Butte Ag, Inc., Werner Farm Seed and Alforex Seeds.
Converting the seeds from 40,000–pound truckloads to 50-pound sacks is a labor-intensive process with many steps the company must follow to maintain its certification as a licensed seed labeler in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota. Zabel serves as a board member on the Southeast Minnesota chapter of the Midwest Forage Association and the board chairman of the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association.
Zabel Seeds selects plant varieties from university breeding programs including North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois. To maintain the company's certification, inspectors visit the facility at least annually; one from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and another from the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association.
Last fall, the company partners — Zabel, his wife Kim, his father David and mother Linda, and David's cousin Don Borgschatz and his wife Anne — decided to invest in a robot from the German company Kuka, after researching industrial robots since the winter of 2013-2014.
Between then and the time the robot was installed, Zabel had to upgrade the electrical power to the farm to three-phase, change technicians and change robots. An engineer from KC Robotics, Inc. spent four days finalizing the robot's movement parameters. The robot was pre-programmed before it arrived on the farm.
How it works
Zabel fits a brown paper bag onto the chute on an electronic bag-filling scale leading from a grain bin and in six seconds, it is full of 50 pounds of grain. He adjusts the bag's opening and slaps on a label before the stitching machine plying blue and white threads closes the bag. Then the bag moves along the conveyor belt to the next station, where it must change its direction of travel and fall flat in a carefully controlled way.
Zabel has figured out a system using rollers and a pneumatic cylinder that gently forces the bag to fall forward and land on the conveyor belt leading to the robot's receiving conveyor. The bag travels up a slight incline to a roller conveyor, where small guides keep it nudged into its ideal position under the Kuka's bent, forked "hands."
When the bag reaches its destination, an optical sensor stops the conveyor and lets the robot know a bag is available. This shows up as a red dot of light on the bag. The Kuka arm reaches down and gently picks it up.
Then the machine swings around to the waiting pallet and drops the bag to form a perfectly stacked full pallet of seed. The robot knows where each of the bags must go so the full pallet of seeds is perfectly level.
Zabel has stacked pallets three high in the warehouse. And on each pallet, all the labels always face out. How does that happen? When a bag comes rolling down the conveyor belt, the label is always in the upper left corner.
It's part of the programming for the Kuka, said Zabel, showing drawings of bag positions he made for each layer of each pallet. These drawings were used to help program the robot. Labels must face out for easy reading by warehouse handlers, truckers and farmers alike. The Kuka easily twirls the bags so they not only end up in the proper position in their respective layer, but the labels are always facing out.
The robot is programmed to stack two pallets before Zabel has to stop and use his forklift to ferry the pallets to the warehouse where they are stacked three-high to wait for a purchaser.
Labels: sacrosanct for the seed business
Because Zabel Seeds is a certified dealer, each printed label is consecutively numbered and each label must be accounted for.
Every bag in each 80,000-pound "lot" of seeds that Zabel handles is identifiable by the label sewn onto it. The labels change with each lot.
Besides multiple lots, there are multiple varieties of seeds. Between each variety, Zabel must clean every nook and cranny of the seed-feeding chutes and bin.
The floors are swept and vacuumed and everything must be spic and span before the processing of the next variety begins.
The Kuka doesn't help with the cleaning, but it does preserve Zabel's back and shoulders.
And, "it has increased the handling efficiency over 400 percent," he said.
The Zabels think it may be the best investment the company has made in years. Because of the seasonal nature of the business, qualified laborers are difficult to find, and it allows the family-owned company to keep producing top-quality seed without the effects of the bag- stacking labor.
