Leigh Lamontagne Talks Grain Grading
As usual, Ground Truth Ag’s in-house grain grading expert, Leigh Lamontagne, has been staring at grain kernels all morning.
“One thing that a lot of people don't realize about grain grading is that it's not something you learn quickly – it takes a lot of experience for someone to be really good at it,” he explains. “You need to get good training followed by good experience followed by more training and experience repeatedly for years before anybody can get good at it.”
“There are so many nuances to what you're looking at with so many factors that impact grain quality – especially for various kinds of wheats but also for other commodities like barleys, oats, oil seeds to all kinds of different pulse crops. Grain graders may work in an area where they are grading 14 different types of grain being delivered. To learn and become really good at grading so many different grains will take a lot of time – not only because there are so many things to learn about each one of them, but also because how the quality factors look can change due to the weather conditions. Also, there are some grading factors that you might go 10 years and only see once.”
Leigh has spent his lifetime in the agricultural sector and throughout his various roles has developed a level of expertise in grain grading and handling that is rare to find. He understands not only the amount of work that goes into developing grain grading expertise but also the challenges with grading subjectivity the entire sector faces – from farmers to grain handlers and buyers.
“Right now, you've got to do a lot of legwork as a farmer to get a good read on your quality,” Leigh reflects. “You could just take it to one place, but you might find that if you take it to three different grain handlers, you're going to get a variation on those answers - and those results might help you decide what you're going to do with it. It’s also not easy for farmers to get a good representative sample. There is always that disconnect between the sample you took and what ends up in each truck as it leaves the bin. In the end, you hope that the average of all those trucks is exactly equal to your harvest sample – but it might not be.”
These challenges with fully understanding grain quality then work their way up the handling system and through the end-use customers.
“You've got a supply chain that's trying to move millions of tons of grain very quickly in a short period of time. You need the quality that's being delivered into facilities to meet the end-users’ specifications. There's not a lot of extra capacity in the handling system to deal with product that isn’t meeting your specifications.”
The automated grain grading technology he is helping Ground Truth Ag to develop and perfect may be a game changer for the agricultural sector.
“This technology has the potential to go a long way to streamlining that whole process from farmer to customer and removing that subjectivity. I am surprised and excited by the technology every time there's a new update to the program, but my next thought is usually surprise at how easy human brains make it for us to see differences in things and quickly. I know how complex and powerful our technology is and how much work has gone in to train this machine – and we can contain something in our heads that does something that is so similar.”
