Wheat Harvesting

[Crabapple Farm]

So this is not directly draft animal related, but we won’t be using the tractor either. In the middle to end of July we’re planning to harvest a half acre of winter wheat by hand, as a community-event, work-bee, harvest-festival, or what have you.
We’ll be mowing with grain cradles, binding by hand, and stooking it in the field, unless we decide that making a bigger rick makes sense. Last year the turkeys pulled our shocks apart, but I don’t want to put it in a rick unless it is pretty dry. We don’t have barn space for it until after it’s threshed.
This has been the year for interest in grain growing around here, which luckily we were quietly already doing. We’re trialling small lots of several different varieties of wheat, as well as testing out a larger scale harvest than what we’ve done in the past. We’ve gotten a lot of positive response so far, but we’ll see how many people actually show up.
Anyone near western mass interested in showing up and seeing how we do it and helping out is more than welcome.

Anyone else in the northeast put grain up in ricks before threshing? Last year it worked well for us, but we left the shocks out in the field for a week or so before building the rick, so had some extra drying time.
We’ve thought about getting a binder, and if we stumble across one probably won’t be able to pass it up, but we haven’t really been looking. At this point the cradles seem more appropriate for our scale. It seems like the binder is a heck of a machine to keep running and overkill for anything less than about two acres. My limited experience is that the first pass or two involves stopping alot and fiddling with it, so in a half acre field you never get up to speed. Anyone with more experience have any thoughts on scale-appropriateness of binders?

-Tevis

[Lane Linnenkohl]

We’d like to start raising small grains within the next few years and harvest them the way you’re describing. Love to see some photos of your process and read your assessment of how everything works.

Lane Linnenkohl

[Kristin]

Tevis, keep us posted on how this goes. Will you thresh by hand? We also have a half acre of winter wheat to harvest this summer. We bought a grain binder last year but it needs more work than we have time between now and harvest. Are you anywhere near Springfield? I have to make a trip out there in July.

Since we’re talking grain, we *just* got our corn planted. Again. The first planting rotted — bad seed. But at least it was an opportunity to put some miles on our new two-row corn planter, which we picked up at the Green Mountain Draft Horse Association auction this spring. Don’t know if we’ll see much of a crop, having planted this late, but anything will be better than nothing. We just bought 20 tons of organic corn to get the hogs and chickens through the year and nearly wept at the cost of it.

all best,
Kristin

[Joshua Kingsley]

noting that you just got your corn planted and are organic have you thought of interseeding instead of the traditional cultivation? we have been planting lidino clover inbetween the rows of our corn and have noted two advantages. first it fixes nitrogen and second it gives us better pasture after the fall harvest.

[Crabapple Farm]

No, Kristin, we won’t thresh by hand. We tried that last year and it didn’t go as well as we hoped. I had threshed out dry beans in the past with flails, which is easy, so thought threshing the wheat wouldn’t be a problem. It didn’t thresh nearly as easily.
So instead I rigged up a mechanical beast:
A friend gave me an old leaf shredder she had taking up space in the garage, I replaced the gas engine I couldn’t get to start with an old two speed electric motor my dad had kicking around, added some boards and bits of tin to make it into a thresher, and “added” a fan from the old oil furnace we tore out of the basement when we moved here to winnow it while it threshes (the fan’s powerful enough that it has to be set about ten feet away to avoid blowing the grain away with the chaff). It works reasonably well, if we increase our production much more we’ll have to get something better. The main problem is it can’t handle the straw without clogging, so we have to stick each sheaf in one at a time – it only takes about ten seconds per sheaf, but that does add up.
Last year the wheat sat in the barn in the sheaves for a couple months between the time we tried threshing by hand and I finished rigging up the electric thresher. Which meant that when we threshed it there was a lot of mouse poop mixed in, which we weren’t able to winnow out. The chickens don’t mind, but we had been hoping to have it fit for human consumption. This year, with a threshing rig worked out, hopefully we’ll be able to thresh more promptly, before the rodents get into it.
Yes, Kristin, we’re fairly close to Springfield, MA, at least compared to from where you are. It would be great to have you stop by.
Lane, I’ll see if I can figure out how to get a picture or two from last year posted, and will post more when we get through this year’s harvest.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

Follow-up on our wheat harvesting.
While the notion of a community harvesting bee is great, the reality is that these days you need to give people more than a week’s notice of an event if you want anyone to show up, and the reason no one grows grain around here is that we can get lots of rain during harvest season.
Our first harvest day went well, about twenty people showed up. we only got about a sixth of an acre reaped, bound, and shocked, though, because I was letting other folks try out the cradle (slower, messier mowing resulting in slower binding) and I wanted to leave the rest of the field for the following week. When we got a thunderstorm. And have been getting thunderstorms most days since. It made me really wish I had a reaper-binder, so we could get it mown off and bound quickly. So I’ve changed my mind on what I said earlier, and now think a reaper-binder is worth it for even only a half acre. Of course, if we find and buy one (and more horses to pull it), I’ll probably want to go plant five acres of wheat.
But we have some wheat that we harvested, and as soon as we get a chance are going to start harvesting the barley and oats.
-Tevis

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