A decorticator (from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

: ''cortex'', bark) is a machine for stripping the skin, bark, or rind off nuts, wood, plant stalks, grain, etc., in preparation for further processing.

History

In 1933, a farmer named Bernagozzi from

Bologna Bologna (, , ; egl, label= Emilian, Bulåggna ; lat, Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 400,000 inhabitants and 150 different nat ...

manufactured a machine called a ''"scavezzatrice"'', a decorticator for

hemp Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a botanical class of ''Cannabis sativa'' cultivars grown specifically for industrial or medicinal use. It can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants o ...

.Paolo Ranalli and Gianpietro Venturi: Hemp as a raw material for industrial applications, Euphytica, Euphytica 140: 1–6, 2004.
/ref> A working hemp decorticator from 1890, manufactured in Germany, is preserved in a museum in Bologna. In Italy, the''"scavezzatrice"'' faded in the 1950s because of monopolisation from fossil fuel, paper interests, synthetic materials and from other less profitable crops. Many types of decorticators have been developed since 1890. In 1919, George Schlichten received a U.S.

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

on his improvements of the decorticator for treating fiber bearing plants. Schlichten failed to find investors for production of his decorticator and died in 1923, a broken man. His business was revived a decade after death in 1933. Newer, high-speed kinematic decorticators, use a different mechanism, enabling separation into three streams; bast fibre, hurd, and green microfiber.

Current usage

In some decorticators, the operation is "semi-automatic", featuring several stops during operation, while more modern systems, such as high-speed kinematic decorticators, are fully automatic. There are companies who produce and sell decorticators for different crops.GOYUM; Decorticators
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References

Agricultural machinery {{Industry-stub