Bean and Pea Harvesters

I have knowledge of two Chisholm Ryder Bean pickers in field ready condition. They both need homes and are priced to move. Both are in the northwest, but priced where the transportation is affordable. My own is slated for rebuilding and I haven't had time to do it. For the time being, we are out of the bean and pea business.

These machines pick southern peas, snap beans, lima beans and English peas equally well. If you cannot get pickers to harvest your bean and pea crops, the machines may well be your life saver.

April Showers?

A least we are getting rain. Possibly lots of it. This is good for crop development. I am sure we will meet our very modest grain production goals for this year. All this will go into flour and corn meal milling as the summer progresses. We really need a crop of hard red wheat for bread flour and I plan to rotate that in next year. I am going to follow grain with Argentine Bahaiagrass.

There a lot of debate about Bahaiagrass. It is a love / hate thing. It is cheap, easy pasture and cheap, easy erosion control and excellent for wildlife habitat. It is the long term weed and pest suppression characteristics that I am most interested in. Back in the late 70's when I started farming our family property, I noticed a crop vigor that now, 30 odd years later, I don't see. I am interested in restoring that vigor to our fields.

I hope to plant this into a prepared seed bed this summer as the grain crops are harvested. This will require some moisture. Weather is the key to our efforts, but it really doesn't require the same amount of rain as needed for produce crops.

All went pretty well last month. Few malfunctions to ruminate about. I would have liked better consistency from our grain drill, but that was mostly operator error. There are a couple of things I need to fix in that regard, but none are insurmountable.

There is no small amount of skepticism from locals about what we are doing. Generations of deep plowing are hard to remove from the gene pool.