The Bucket Thresher

My threshing companion.

As I've stated on previous posts, part of what I believe will make us successful here at Prairie Heritage Farm, is the specialty crops we will be able to grow. Since we farm in a sparsely populated location, we are limited in where we can market our fresh vegetables. To balance that, we also focus on Thanksgiving turkeys and heritage and ancient grains. While we tout the freshness of our grains, there is far more flexibility in delivering them to our markets. And, our markets can reach all over the state, without fear of the grain going bad as our vegetables would if we tried to sell them hundreds of miles away.

But, we realized when we started that there are not that many unique varieties of grains and seeds anymore. Whereas 100 or even 50 years ago, farmers grew what worked for their location, our nation's wheat and barley varieties have been exclusively bred for economically advantageous characteristics such as high yields, short straw, or other purely agronomic traits. No consideration has been made for a grain's nutritional profile (except for protein), unique tastes, or cooking qualities. Or, a grain's ability to thrive in a specific location.



Knowing we wouldn't be able to survive if we grew modern varieties that would be fed into the commodity marketplace, we set out to explore the hundreds and thousands of unique ancient and heritage varieties of grains and seeds still surviving in very small quantities. After procuring over 200 different varieties of wheat in 2009, we planted small plots to assess their general ability to thrive in our particular environment. Many didn't do well, but quite a few produced an abundant crop. Unfortunately, as beginning farmers with limited skills and time, the only realistic way to assess a variety's future value was, ironically, to measure its yield. To test its nutritional profile would be costly as well as take away from our limited seed supply. There was comfort knowing that any heritage variety that did well (from a strictly yield standpoint) likely had wonderful nutritional and taste characteristics since it hadn't been aggressively bred for large scale agriculture.

We harvested the plants with scissors, and after the season slowed down in 2009, we hand-threshed and weighed the wheat. Based on yields, we planted out the best varieties in 2010, paring it down to about 30 different varieties. We also started trialing varieties of barley, dry beans, amaranth, quinoa, and teff.

Today, I'm in the spare bedroom of the house we rent in town, looking at the sacks of wheat we cut with scissors in 2010. It was rough on the hands and took quite a while to hand-thresh the wheat from 2009. God bless the internet, for I stumbled upon this video of a farmer who built a bucket thresher for his grain. Instead of 2 chains, I just used one at the end of the all-thread with a bearing glued to the bucket lid so that I can raise and lower the chain within the bucket. So far, it has worked well. When the weather warms up a bit (it's currently about 2 below), I'll take the threshed grain and run it in front of a fan to blow away the chaff. Then I'll be able to weigh it and hand plant out the best varieties in the hopes that in 2012, I'll be able to have enough of a few varieties to seed with the tractor and seed drill.


The chain.


The bearing glued to the lid.

If there is one thing I've discovered in working with grain, it is that the current infrastructure is not designed for small acreage. While the trialing can be done by hand - from planting to harvesting to cleaning - once you increase to over 1/4 acre or so, there doesn't seem to be any intermediate option. We've gotten by with borrowed equipment (tractor and hoe drill), an old combine, and a borrowed fanning mill, but none of it does an exceptional job, And to hire it out, especially the cleaning, would cost us a fortune (even if somebody were willing to deal with our rinky-dink scale).

So as we develop our unique varieties of grains and seeds, and build our enterprises, we continue to explore ways in which to manage and control the process from field to plate. We will need to invest in equipment, in particular, cleaning equipment, but we need to be very careful about how we do it. We have to convince ourselves the market exists (or create the market) in order to justify the undoubtedly expensive investment, even in moderately sized equipment.

Farming, especially for beginning farmers, is as much about what to plant and where to sell it as it is about deciding what to spend your severely limited capital on, in the hopes it edges you that much closer to long term success.


The wheat before being threshed.


Ready to be threshed.


Threshing.


After running the drill for a few seconds.


Threshed seed.