[pennstatepitt]

pretty neat looking, I’ve never seen one quite like that before. I’m also in a situation of bringing a seed cleaner back to life so I thought that this would be a good thread to ask this question on. Everything on mine works fine with a little tuning, but the previous owner didn’t have any screens that went with it so I’ll be building them. What I don’t know is what size screens to use for different seeds. I’ll be using it for wheat and buchwheat this year and hopefully for oats, sorghum, clover maybe some forage grasses. Thanks for the help, I’m having trouble finding much information.

[pennstatepitt]

Just a couple thoughts from an inexperienced ag-philosopher 😉 (Just starting with grazing, only just got out of college so acknowledge inexperience)

I’ve had a couple of lively discussions with the farmer (“conventional”) that I work for, I claim that modern dairy farmers are not in the food creating business anymore, that they are in the same business as Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo, i.e. turning corn into something that people want. While it seems counterintuitive to think that farmers are not food providers it is a sad truth, dairy, beef, pork, and chicken farmers are in the corn processing business. I think this is very important for a couple reasons:

1) feeding a cow 1 calorie of corn will return less than 1 calorie of human food resulting in a loss of energy to the human population-not insignificant in a world full of starvation

2) Pertaining to the environmental debate- proponents of big ag and confined feeding operations like to go on ad nauseum about how they are more sustainable because they produce more milk (meat, eggs…) per carbon equivalent. However, I think we need to look at a new metric (perhaps not new but I haven’t seen it used anywhere) of food produced per carbon equivalent. The more food produced per carbon equivalent the better (assuming that carbon emmissions is the best metric of environmental sustainablility which it probably isn’t but that’s for another time). Some of the heavy feeding operations may even come in with a negative result because this metric takes into account the human digestible food fed to the livestock (i.e. grains) and some of that energy will be lost to the animals maintenance energy. An all forage dairy will always have a positive result because humans can’t utilize forage. Also, a healthy soil will metabolize the methane produced by the cows on it (see Jim Gerrish’s last to articles in the “Stockman”

[pennstatepitt]

Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear I guess. I’m not looking for posts, I was just pointing out a potential market for them.

I started using the pennstatepitt handle before going to college, am a steelers and penn state football fan.

[pennstatepitt]

I don’t have any experience in this area yet, but I graduated from Cornell University this spring and while I was there I took some hort. classes. In one of them we went to the research orchards where they had piles of cedar posts for a new organic grape block since pressure treated posts are not permitted in organic. I asked if locust would work and the prof. said, “locust would be great, if we could get it.” Seems like there might be some opportunity there. The grape industry is growing fast in the Finger Lakes, NY area, as well as organic, especially around Ithaca. Once again, no experience, just a thought.

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