The Mill
Where paddy becomes cargo.
Basmati is not made in the field alone. Between the harvest and the container there are months of patience and minutes of precision, and both are engineering problems. This is how ours is built.
Capacity
The plant at a glance
Capacity means little without the ability to hold one specification across every shift of it. These are the figures a delivery schedule is built from.
- MT per hour milling
- [18]MT per hour milling
- MT paddy storage
- [22,000]MT paddy storage
- Optical sorting passes
- [6]Optical sorting passes
- Hours, three shifts
- [24]Hours, three shifts
The Process
From paddy to port, in detail
The homepage gives this in five lines. Here is what happens inside each of them.
- 01
Intake & grading
Every truck is sampled before it is tipped. Moisture, admixture, immature grain, foreign matter and the smell of the paddy are read at the gate, and a lot that misses the intake band is turned away rather than blended down. The lot number written here is the one that ends up on the container.
- 02
Drying & storage
Paddy arrives wet from the field and has to come down to a storage-safe moisture without shocking the grain. Dried too fast, the endosperm fissures and the grain breaks in the mill months later, long after anyone would think to blame the dryer. We step the moisture down in stages and rest the lot between passes.
- 03
Ageing
Aged paddy is the whole argument for premium Basmati. Held in the husk under controlled temperature and humidity, the grain sheds free moisture, the starch reorganises and the aroma concentrates. Cooked, an aged grain elongates further, drinks more water and stays separate. Lots are held [12 to 24 months] before they are milled.
- 04
Milling & polishing
Rubber-roll shelling takes the husk off with minimal contact, then whitening and silky polishing are taken in gentle successive passes rather than one aggressive cut. Every pass is a chance to snap an 8.35 mm grain, and breakage is the one defect that cannot be sorted back out afterwards.
- 05
Sortex & grading
Length graders separate whole grain from broken. Optical sorters read each grain against the lot standard and eject the discoloured, the chalky and the black-tipped. Rejects are re-run rather than written off, and the accepted stream is re-sampled before it reaches the packing line.
- 06
Packing & stuffing
Packing runs against the buyer's approved artwork and destination labelling. Containers are checked for taint and damp, lined where the route calls for it, and sealed with the seal number recorded on the shipping documents.
The Long Game
Storage and ageing
Ageing is the most expensive thing a mill can choose to do, because it means holding stock you have already paid for and cannot yet sell. It is also the entire difference between rice that elongates and rice that merely cooks.
We store in the husk, never as milled rice. The bran layer is the grain's own packaging, and it holds in the aroma that milling lets go. Warehouses are [held at X°C and Y% relative humidity] and monitored [weekly]; stock rotates strictly by lot age, never by convenience.
Paddy storage warehouse
In-husk stock held under climate control, for the shoot list.
The Line
Machinery
Stage by stage, with the throughput each is rated to.
| Stage | Equipment | Rated throughput |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-cleaning | Drum pre-cleaner and destoner | [20] MT/hr |
| Shelling | Rubber-roll sheller | [18] MT/hr |
| Separation | Paddy separator | [18] MT/hr |
| Whitening | Vertical abrasive whitener | [12] MT/hr |
| Polishing | Silky polisher | [12] MT/hr |
| Length grading | Indented cylinder grader | [10] MT/hr |
| Colour sorting | Multi-channel optical sorter | [8] MT/hr |
| Packing | Net-weigh bagging line | [15] MT/hr |
Traceability
Traceability
The lot number written at the intake gate travels with the grain. It survives drying, ageing, milling and packing; it is printed on the bag and recorded against the container seal. When a buyer calls about one bag, we can name the village the paddy came from and the week it was cut.