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| From Seed Cleaning Equipment |
Up on Skyline, in the West hills of Portland, we trialed 12 bush beans for dry bean production this year. They were all grown dry land style, no supplemental irrigation in an area where there is no summer rain (unfortunately there is usually a small rain, or two, just as the pods are drying). We grew all of the varieties one in direct seeded rows 3 feet apart. The beans were hand hoed several times during the season and required little if any hand weeding in the rows. When the majority of the pods were dry we clipped plants and stored them on remay on a gravel floor of a pole barn for about a month. Last week we threshed and winnowed all of the varieties and took initial yield weights. They still need some finial cleaning but the majority of work is done.
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| From Seed Cleaning Equipment |
To thresh the beans we ran them through a Roto Hoe chipper shredder with fixed blades. Some of the varieties needed to have the motor run slow to limit splitting, others needed higher speed to thresh out all of the beans. Some of the varieties still had quite a bit of leaf and vine which made them more difficult to feed through the chipper, and others had minimal leaf and vine left and ran through very easily. Additionally some varieties hadn't matured as evenly and still had some green beans left.
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| From Seed Cleaning Equipment |
For most varieties there was quite a bit of large trash so we used a 1/2 inch wire mesh to scalp before winnowing. For the winnowing we used a simple floor fan and 10 gallon Rubbermaid totes. We also used a 6' x 8' tarp to catch material, and incase we had any spillage that we wanted to recover. We also used a larger 12'x24' tarp to keep the gravel clean and to make clean up in the end easier.
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| From Seed Cleaning Equipment |
Initial results showed yields between 2 and 5.5 pounds of beans per 50 row feet. The cost of production for 50 row feet worked out to roughly $20 from field preparation through winnowing. Final cleaning will add a few dollars bringing the cost of the beans to the neighborhood of $4-11 per pound. At least half the cost of production is in harvest and cleaning. The majority of the other cost is in hand hoeing, although this could be significantly reduced with tractor cultivation.
I'll post the varieties and notes soon. We have also been trialing some pole bean varieties in a three sisters style planting and those are still producing beans but I'll give a report on those when we process them, probably in November.
