 We've harvested the rice. Now we're at the business end where we mill the rice into a product to eat. So the first thing that happened after we harvested the rice is we took it to dry. It was at a moisture content of about 21% from memory. And we took it and dried it in a flatbed dryer down to a moisture of about 14%. So Martin's going to measure the moisture content of a sample before our eyes and hopefully it's what I claim it is. So I can't actually measure the sample that has been in the mill because it's already milled. But I have another sample here and the ideal moisture content for milling is between 13 and 14%. And so the first step would basically be to measure the moisture content. And this is an example for a moisture meter, the eerie moisture meter. You put a small sample of grains in there and then you crush them. And then by measuring the resistance, it gives you the moisture content. And this basically tells you that the sample that we have is still too wet. We couldn't use that for milling. So that's more than 16%. It's more than 14% in this case. And basically this would also tell us if it's right for milling between 14% or whether it's right for seeds. What happens if you mill it when it's wetter than 14%? If you mill it wetter than the grain is very soft and we get a lot of damage in the rice mill. By basically the machines crushing the grains. So your milling yield would be a lot lower. And what if it's too dry? If it's too dry, then it's too brittle. And again because of mechanical stress you get more cracking because it's so brittle and again you get more losses. And for the drying there are different options. This grain was dried in the flatbed dryer. But the flatbed dryer is a very simple technology that can be locally produced and produces reasonably good quality. But then there are also more sophisticated dryers like we have run over there, which is a so-called recirculating batch dryer which allows us to produce really the optimum quality of the paddy before we do the milling. Okay, okay. So when we were growing the crop, particularly when we were harvesting the crop, the goal was to harvest the crop at about 20-21% moisture and then dry it down because that will give us the greatest grain quality and yield, whole grain yield through the mill. Now what do I mean by whole grain yield if we come over to our little demonstration bench over here? It's to start with the paddy to remove the husk, to remove the bran layer which is just underneath the husk and that's what brown rice still has the brown layer and to get whole grain and broken grain. There's not much we can do to manipulate the quantity of husk we have. Likewise there's not much we can do to manipulate the amount of bran we have but the whole idea of the management in the field and in the drying process and the milling process itself is to get as much whole grain as possible and as little broken grain. The whole grain is worth a lot, the broken grain isn't worth so much. So in most markets the rice is traded according to different quality stand nuts and one of the stand nuts for example looks at the percentage of broken grains. So you would have typically stand nuts that say for example rice is 5% broken so there would be 95% whole grains and 5% broken. Similarly there's rice is 10% broken and also it's 25% broken and one of the objectives of rice milling is then also basically to produce according to that stand nuts and there are different equipments in the rice mill that help us doing that. After the grain has been dried to the appropriate moisture content it's then delivered to the mill and the first stage is the de-hulling where we have two rubber rollers set at a very close clearance to each other and one roller is travelling just a little bit slower than the other roller and that abrasion motion, that pincer motion removes the husk from the rice it then goes on to a gravity table which then in a horizontal reciprocating motion it's on a slight angle and that successfully removes the hulled rice the hulled brown rice from the rice that was not successfully hulled and the rice that was not successfully hulled goes back to be de-hulled again. After that it goes through three stages of polishing an abrasion stone polisher, a friction polisher and then you also have a choice of a mist polisher if you want that final shall I call it sheen for a really quality, high quality product that really looks as desirable as it tastes and there's one final process after the polishing process it's then graded for size both through a rotary sifter and through a length grader and that separates the hulled rice from the broken rice ironically then the broken rice is often then mixed back into the hulled rice but at a known percentage it's typically 5% more there are very different standards the best quality is usually has 5% broken and the worst quality 25% broken and then beyond that local markets often don't implement those standards so there you might find 60% broken or even more depending on the quality of the raw material and also the performance of the rice. So it is usually broken grains are mixed back into the whole grains at a known standard typically 5% to 25%. The final stage in a sophisticated rice mill is the colour sorter there's an ingenious piece of technology that runs streams of milled rice grain in a single grain stream there's sensors that sense the colour of individual grains and if the colour is not white enough basically that could be from poor milling it could be because it's a foreign object like a stone there's nothing as much fun as a stone in your rice a short sharp jet of compressed air will remove the grain and so those final high standard sorting processes is quite a common process in high standard rice mills and then hence you have the finished product whole grain well milled rice with a known quantity of broken in it and that's really the objective of the whole process So there we have it the business end this is where the white rice that we know and enjoy is produced and we've covered off on the processes before the milling and during the milling that allow us to produce as much quality white rice as possible and a minimum of everything else and the objective is really to sort of use the potential of the paddy and get the maximum amount of whole grains and the minimum amount of broken and also basically presented in a way that the consumers really like it