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Great climate for seeds
Seed specialist KWS is investing heavily in the expansion and modernisation of its sugar beet seed production at its Einbeck location. As part of these measures, a new storage area was created where the seeds are stored under climate-controlled conditions. The seeds are filled automatically into special storage boxes and stored with a stacker crane. OHRA supplied a racking system precisely tailored to these storage containers as well as a steel construction platform on which the system for loading and unloading the containers is installed.
Enclosure creates constant climate
To create constant, defined environmental conditions for the seeds, the entire racking system is enclosed. The special storage boxes, together with the air conditioning of the storage area, ensure that parameters such as temperature or humidity can be set easily and reliably. The entire process of filling or transferring the containers is fully automatic.
Unit of racking, platform, and stacker crane
For this storage area, OHRA supplied and installed a 27.3-metre-long pallet rack, which provides storage space for approx. 100 of the storage containers weighing up to 600 kilograms. Directly connected to the racking is a steel construction platform also supplied by OHRA. The tipping device is installed on top of it, via which the seeds transported by conveyor belts or bucket elevators are filled into storage containers positioned below. The containers are then picked up and stored by a stacker crane from Köttgen, which, like OHRA, belongs to the Hölscher Group. The brackets and the guide rail for the stacker crane were guided along the entire length of the system. In this way, the rack and the stage form a single unit. This ensures seamless transport of the containers from the tipping unit to the racking location.
The new racking system makes an important contribution to increasing the capacity of KWS' production facilities. This ensures that the high demand from customers can be met in the future with the expected quality of goods.
About KWS:
KWS is one of the world's leading plant breeding companies. More than 5,700 employees in 70 countries generated a turnover of 1.3 billion euros in the 2019/2020 financial year. For more than 160 years, KWS has been run independently as a family-owned company. The focus is on plant breeding and the production and sale of maize, sugar beet, cereal, rapeseed, sunflower and vegetable seed. KWS uses state-of-the-art plant breeding methods to increase farmers' yields and further improve the resistance of plants to diseases, pests and abiotic stress.
