Cleaning flax

We have just finished cleaning the flax in the warehouse. This is our second season cleaning flax, and we are getting much better at it. Last year we cleaned about 6000 pounds for a small farm near Junction City. Since our system is designed for large amounts of seed, it was difficult to get the flax as clean as we would have liked. This year we were much better prepared, but we still had issues such as screen placement, machine speeds, air flow speed, etc. We had to tweak and re-tweak the setting many times to finally get it right. We had a lot of help from the Cimbria rep. (Cimbria is the manufacturer of our main cleaner). We were able to minimize our seed loss to the point that we only had about 2-3,000 pounds of screenings out of 16-18,000 pounds of seed. Which isn't bad considering the screenings from flax are worth several hundred dollars a ton to poultry farmers. Flax screenings make valuable feed additions to chickens for the omega-3 content. Although we got the flax very close to retail-ready, it will still have to be re-cleaned on a gravity table as there is a small amount of weed seed remaining. Kudos to Bill our warehouse manager for being so persistent in going after high quality. Nice work Bill!

Harvesting garbanzo beans

Today we started harvesting the garbanzo beans. This entailed walking along with shears and cutting them at the roots, then coming along behind with a wheelbarrow and picking them up. Sounds simple, right? Sure, but one 3-acre field took 9 hours, and we're still not done, and it was raining! We can't use a combine because there aren't enough to justify using it, too many beans would get lost in the machine during threshing. Also, the beans aren't tall enough. The average height is about 10-12 inches. We would probably crush as many as we cut. So, 4 of us trundled out there and stooped, crawled, kneeled, and hacked our way across the field. We are laying the bushes out to dry on a large tarp in the hay shed. We haven't decided how we are going to separate bean from pod yet. We should finish that piece and the other 2 very small pieces tomorrow.

Grain harvest is done!

We have finished with the grain harvest and have moved on to preparing the ground for next season. I don't have accurate yield figures yet, and I won't until we clean and process all the crop. The white wheat yielded higher than expected. The red wheat was about what we expected to get. The flax was lower than expected. The oats yielded slightly higher than expected, with the exception of the hull-less oats which was slightly lower than we hoped. We didn't have expectations of a huge yield from the hull-less oats as the variety was from Manitoba and needs to be acclimatized. We feel that this year we will have better yields as we will plant all the wheat in the fall. Hopefully we will get better red wheat yields if it is fall planted.

Harvest update

We are almost done with all the combine work. We've finished the hard red and soft white wheat, and most of the cayuse oats. We have about 9-11 acres of flax left to do, and all of the naked oats. By the end of this week all the standing grain will have been thrashed. The beans, sunflowers, and walnuts still have a little ways to go before they are ready to harvest. The yelloweye beans looked pretty bad not too long ago, and they still don't look great, but we looked at them closely today and saw lots of pods. There is a photo of a yelloweye with pods, as well as a photo of the yelloweyes next to the pintos. What was interesting about that was the pintos failed completely in that part of the field, while the yelloweyes did not. The pintos were a total failure actually. It seemed that the yelloweyes did better in areas where the pintos just stopped growing. The sunflowers are ripening at vastly different rates. We will have to be harvesting them continually for weeks once the most mature ones are ready. Some flowers have still not opened at all, while others are starting to drop their petals already. In a laughably inept effort at deterring birds, I have placed mylar "scare tape" on tall T-posts around the perimeter of the field. I have also made a scarecrow that I am putting up today. Hopefully that will help some in keeping out the birds. I also included photos of the uncleaned flax and red wheat.

The recent wheat price increase...A case for buying local!

I would like to say a few things about the recent furor over rising wheat prices on the commodity market. As many of you may know, Russia suffered a severe drought this year and is reporting a huge crop loss in their wheat harvest. As the third largest wheat producing country on earth, this has a profound effect on the global wheat market. There has been a huge jump in wheat acreage planted in the Willamette Valley this past year due to very low prices on grass seed. I'm sure there are plenty of happy farmers in the valley who will be making another dollar or two per bushel on their wheat crop. The people who are REALLY making the money in this situation are the speculators. Farmers make slightly more, and the consumer pays slightly more, but the traders make MUCH more. This rise in wheat prices is for conventional wheat only, but it may have something of a trickle-down effect on the local organic grain market. There have been articles written in the past week or two that say consumers will feel the pinch at the grocery store through higher bread and meat prices. (Higher meat prices because higher feed grain prices affect meat prices). One of the goals of our farm and the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project is greater food security and stability in the valley. We are capable of producing a huge amount of food for the local market, but the bulk of the grain grown in the valley is exported, and the vast majority of the food consumed in the valley is imported. If you want to insulate yourself from the fluctuations in the world market to a greater degree, then buy food produced by local farmers! Help us build the local food system!

Harvesting soft white winter wheat

This week we started harvesting the soft white winter wheat, yamhill variety. We have approximately 140 acres of it this year. Most of it was planted in October and November, but one field got planted in mid-December, and is looking much weaker as a result. The yield in the fields close to our buildings have been very good so far. It has been a bit stop-and-go while we wait for the moisture content to get down to around 12-12.5 percent. This usually means we can't start combining until about 1-2 pm.

Chef/Baker farm tour a BIG success! Thank you!

The chef/baker farm tour of Stalford's, A2R, and Hunton's farms yesterday was a huge success. We'd like to thank Allison for organizing the event, the Bean and Grain Project for dreaming it up, and all the chefs and bakers who came out with an interest in seeing where some of their ingredients come from! We look forward to the public farm tours later this month. I'm sure there will be a BIG turnout!