Making Flour

The Drought of 2010 -2013 is responsible for the change in our business plan. That and a self-propelled bean picker that has seen better days. The dry weather actually started four years ago in a summer that was dry but not excessively so. We received enough rainfall at just the right time to make one of the best purplehull pea crops we ever had. We averaged 60-100 bushels per acre. We harvested with a Pixall BH-100 bean harvester. Loved that machine. We wanted to plant more acreage and that meant expansion. We traded the one row for a Chisholm Ryder MDH and a continuous pea sheller, boosting our thru put to 100 bushels per hour. We added a winter crop of sweet peas to the mix (Spring was the variety and they did very well). That is when our troubles started. The winter was a bit dry, but the peas made. Then the MDH blew a head gasket. We still had the BH-100 at the time so we harvested the crop with it instead. We spent about $1200 repairing the head gasket, when we discovered the gasket was blown because of a bad oil cooler leaking water into the oil. The oil cooler set us back another $600. The next season, the crop was almost nonexistent and we had no irrigation. Mechanical problems continued with the MDH. The next summer was worse, far worse. We planted mustard and rye last fall hoping to get some plant coverage over the soil so it didn't blow away. Some rain did come late in the winter and the cover crops made.

The rye did really well, and it cause us to think about raising grain. Margins on small grain are small, to say the least, and the only way ton profit from it is to make some value added product. Since there was no large industrial quantity of it, we decided to buy a table top flour mill, use our seed cleaning apparatus from our pea and bean operation to clean it up, then grind and market rye flour. The results were much better than we expected with regard to the product. We use it in our own cooking. Since I am a diabetic, rye fit nicely into my diet plan. Carbs are carbs, from a counting perspective, but replacing wheat bread with rye has had a positive effect on my health. The flour is just plain good.

On a whim we decided to attempt raising a little Native American corn for cornmeal and irrigating it.  We researched this extensively and found two acceptable cultivars which we have planted in our fields.

We still have a few peas.

Along the way, we decided to raise dry edible beans, which is how we came across our combine. Unfortunately, the farm is thousands in the red because of all this. I shiver to think about it. we are far from insolvent, but it would be nice to see some income again. All this has been pushing us to more conventional farming, planting the usual commodity crops and utilizing Federal Crop Insurance and the like. It is a safer way to do business. Had I had not had enough personal capital and income aside from the farm we would have been out of it by now.

I spend a lot of time marketing rye flour now. It is available on eBay http://www.ebay.com/itm/Elliott-Family-Farms-Heirloom-Whole-Grain-Rye-Flour-2-pounds-/281119557919?pt=Small_Kitchen_Appliances_US&hash=item417408091f

Give it a try! We appreciate your business!