MILLING

From the farmers’silos the paddy is transported to the industrial establishments which are continually improving technologically, reducing milling time and labour involvement: from more than three hundred only a few decades ago their numbers have been halved, and of these only about twenty can be considered large, handling 80% of the work. The smaller ones are increasingly disappearing.
What follows is a brief description of the processes that the rice has to undergo. On arrival the rice is passed through various conduits in a machine which removes dust, seeds, any residual matter and small stones (diagram 1). Then it undergoes husking. a process to remove the external covering (the husk) of the grain: this is achieved by passing the rice through two high-speed rubber disks, which revolve at different speeds (diagram 2). The resulting rice still contains grains with the husk intact and these are separated and recuperated on the basis of their weight difference by a machine called a paddy separator.

They are then subjected to a further selection process which is the separation of immature (green) grains from mature ones. This operation is carried out by a machine capable of selecting grains by size. It is after this stage that the rice may be sold as brown’ rice (diagram 3).

After husking the rice is still covered by a light yellowish sheath. To remove this, the rice passes through the whitening and polishing machine to become "polished rice" (diagram 4).

During the whitening and polishing process some grains are broken so the next stage is to separate these. This is done by passing the rice through a slot perforated grading cylinder which retains the whole grains but not the broken ones.

The rice is now ready to be packaged and the rice-mills are equipped with extremely fast and precise machinery to achieve this (diagram 5). Some of them have introduced vacuum packaging.