by Gene Logsdon
Barley is an important grain for areas like Montana where corn does not grow well, since livestock and hogs can be fattened on it. Northwestern cash grain farmers not focused on livestock grow it in place of oats because they believe they can make about $20 more per acre with it. Also what would beer drinkers do without malt barley? Barley is grown exactly the way wheat is grown. Sometimes it is hard to tell the two apart in the field from a distance.
Rye adapts to the most northerly grain growing regions. It will germinate at colder temperatures than any other cereal grain. Someone needs to grow rye for rye bread and good Scotch whiskey. In the latter case, leave it to the Scots, I say, who have the climate and know-how for rye. If you want rye flour of your own, then plant some rye. Otherwise, for cover cropping and temporary pastures, oats is better, especially if you are planting oats anyway: you don't have to buy more seed.
Spelt is related to wheat but has one notable difference. It is very low in gluten. For people who can't eat conventional bread because their systems are intolerant to wheat gluten, spelt is about their only choice. Stan Evans Bakery in Grandview, Ohio, near the heart of the spelt producing regions of eastern Ohio, sells a lot of spelt bread. Farmers who traditionally grow spelt say it is better livestock feed than other cereal grains. Although that claim is often disputed, recent research seems to indicate that spelt aids the digestion of other foods. Grow it just as you would grow wheat.
Triticale is a modern cross between wheat and rye and has been hailed as a miracle crop to solve all our problems except how to propel the Cleveland Indians into a World Series. Southern plains ranchers, who sometimes see their wheat wiped out by mosaic diseases, claim that triticale makes a flour as good as wheat flour, and a forage crop (for hay or grazing) better than wheat. Triticale is grown just like wheat. For my climate, wheat is better. A neighbor grew triticale. Once.
Buckwheat is another "grain" that some organic farmers grow for a cash crop. The market is usually in oversupply. Buckwheat's uses as a cover crop and weed choker are usually exaggerated. If you like buckwheat cakes, grow a little as a garden crop.
The best source of seed for all kinds of grain is The Grain Exchange at The Land Institute (2440 East Water Well Road, Salina, Kansas, 67401). The Grain Exchange also publishes good information in its newsletter on ways to harvest and clean grains, and process them into flour.
The Land Institute is an interesting story. Its founder, Wes Jackson, another of my favorite farmers-and certainly the contrariest of them all-became bored and impatient with conventional university approaches to agricultural research, left a career as a plant geneticist in the warm, secure womb of the University of California, went home to Kansas, and started his own school and research farm, the Land Institute. On his own, Wes has become probably the most well-known and certainly most written-about plant geneticist of today. The only magazines that steadfastly refuse to interview him and profile his work are the commercial farm magazines, which should have been the first to recognize and encourage his genius.
Wes has more vision than a whole think-tank full of crystal bailers. He talks with the crackling dry wit of the Plains and says naughty things. Considering the excesses of technology, he grins wickedly and remarks: "Hell is now technologically feasible." Asked his opinion of modern education, he flashes his toothy, mischievous smile and observes: "For tens of thousands of students, the universities have become little more than holding pens that keep them off the job market where millions of hours are devoted to turning out work too shoddy to be either useful or artistic. What we need is not more college majors in upward mobility but a major in homecoming." See his latest book, Becoming Native to This Place (University Press of Kentucky, 1993). Jackson's vision (one of many visions) is a wholly sustainable complex of cottage farms and villages based on a permanent prairie agriculture, each community drawing its energy from the sun, producing its food and fiber needs with little outside reliance on fossil fuel technology-a biologically sophisticated prairie version of my meadow farming. To that end, he and his staff and students have been growing combinations of perennial prairie plants with exotic names like Illinois bundleflower, Maximilian sunflowers, and sideoats grama, which have the potential today to produce food as well as annual grain crops without cultivation, without heavy machinery, and without chemical fertilizer or pesticides. Walking on his native prairie beside his research plots, Wes is overcome with excitement. "There are two hundred species of plants in a typical square mile of this native prairie," he exclaims. "All that information growing there, begging us to draw it out. Add to that the vertebrate animals, the algae, fungi, insects, and all the vast numbers and diversity of micro-organisms that live among these plants. Add to that the diversity within the species. The amount of biological information is just awesome and we know only a small amount of it."
Harvesting Grain
The practical difference between corn and the cereal grains is the size of the ear. Corn or maize ears are large enough to make hand-harvesting of a small acreage practical. Small grains are practical to harvest by hand only in small garden plantings. We used to thresh out about a bushel of garden-grown wheat for our own bread (a bushel makes about sixty loaves) using toy plastic baseball bats and then winnowing the grain in front of a large window fan.
For larger amounts some kind of mechanical way to thresh is necessary, and therein lies the problem for cottage farmers. At this stage in history, nobody is making a reasonably priced cereal grain combine for the small farmer. Vogel seed plot harvesters used by university research stations are expensive (paid for by the taxpayer, of course). So are the small harvesters made in the orient for the preponderantly cottage farm culture of China and Japan. Large farm combines are even more expensive. A new one with a sixteen-foot header now costs nearly $200,000, which farmers couldn't afford if the government did not heavily subsidize cash grain farming. (In a way, it is unfair to criticize farmers for taking these subsidies, because mostly the money goes right through their hands to pay the salaries of the people who make this expensive equipment.) Old, smaller combines like mine are still available cheap, but not easy to find in working order (see chapter 9).
The best news for small farmers on the grain harvesting front is the invention, or re-invention, of the stripper harvester of ancient origin. This new version uses a rotary brush and fixed teeth to literally strip seed or grain out of the heads and then suck them by vacuum into the hopper. The stripper fits conveniently on any tractor front-end loader. A 50-horsepower tractor is big enough. The strippers sell as low as just under $10,000. That is still hefty for a cottage farmer, but nothing else today in new field combines even comes close to being that low-priced. The strippers are made primarily for harvesting fine grass seed, but the manufacturer says they will harvest cereal grains too. Some chaff might remain with the grain but this would not necessarily be a problem for the cottage farmer intending to feed his grain on his farm. The company is Ag-Renewal, Inc. (1710 Airport Road, Weatherford, Oklahoma 73096). If a cottage farm market developed for these harvesters I'm sure they would get cheaper and most likely be improved for cereal grain harvesting.
Of course, threshing and winnowing only 50 to 100 bushels of grain need not be a horrendous job using old traditional methods. Before threshing machines (and still today in some Third World countries like Africa) bunches of grain stalks were laid out, usually in a circle, on a clean barn floor (or hard clay or pavement) and a horse was driven round and round, the trampling action of its hooves knocking the grains out of the heads. The straw was then stacked for use as bedding and the grains swept into piles. On a windy day, front and back doors on the barn floor were opened, and the grain winnowed in the strong air draft that funneled through the barn. When human labor was plentiful, the threshing was more often done with flails, which in a skilled hand did a much better job than horse hooves.
There's said to be an easier way to thresh than using horses' hooves, though I have not tried it myself. If you had a large,
smooth, clean floor (barn or otherwise), instead of running over the grain stalks with a horse, use a lawn tractor. The rubber tires will knock the ripe grain out without injuring it. The grain can then be swept up and winnowed any way you can capture a good breeze. If you think the grain is not clean enough after this weird threshing method, you can wash it, a little at a time, when you bring in a batch to grind and bake into a loaf of bread, running water quickly through it in a colander then spreading the grain out in the sun on a clean sheet so it dries quickly.
I am not really advocating the hand-threshing of grain, except for a few bushels for the human family, but better that we know it can be done than to starve to death some day for lack of a combine. Obviously, in the interim, a combine is the answer and if you can't find one you can afford, you might be able to hire a neighborhood farmer to harvest your grain for you. If you have a larger cottage farm with, say, ten to forty acres of grain, you will find that in most cases it is cheaper at present to hire out the combining than to own a combine-unless you are an excellent mechanic and enjoy restoring old machinery.
There are other alternatives. In Amish country there are plenty of old binders and stationary threshing machines around. Really tenacious cottage farmers could equip themselves with both. A binder cuts the grain and binds it into bundles. The bundles have to be set up into shocks to complete the ripening and drying process. Then the bundles are run through the thresher, the straw blown into strawstacks and the grain separated and augured into a grain wagon or truck.
It was my good fortune to have been living in a "backward" area of Minnesota where communal threshing was still in style in the 1950s. We would go from farm to farm, following the thresher, and harvest each farm's grain. The thresher that served the five farms in our "threshing ring" cost $2000 new in the 1930s and so the annual cost, including repairs to keep it running, was hardly $100 a year. Compare that to today's $200,000 combine which, even while harvesting two to three times more acres a year than those five farms comprised, will cost at least a hundred times more and wear out sooner. That's just another example of why the Amish are often rich while their mega-farm neighbors are dependent on subsidies to make a profit.
But what I cherish now, looking back, is not the economy of communal threshing, but the fun of it. Fifteen of us, more or less, working and joking together in the fields and eating five (yes, five) scrumptious meals rich in cholesterol every day without a qualm. Families bonded together, whether they liked each other or not, in a common economic interest: getting the crop in. That was a real community. What we share today in the pale light of the television screen is something else.
I discovered last year another alternative to the combine-on the Kuerner farm mentioned earlier, where the most significant crop is the masterful paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Karl Koerner, Jr., found a few years ago a cagey way to harvest oats. He has a hay baler because he makes quite a bit of hay, but for the few acres of oats to feed to horses and cows, he couldn't justify a combine.
Karl reasoned thusly: Only cows and horses are going to eat this oats. Cows and horses don't care if the oats is hulled out or not. In fact cows and horses love to eat oat hay and even oat straw as a fiber supplement to grain. (The Minnesota farmer I worked for years ago said in his year of greatest drouth, he kept the cows alive on oats straw, all the feed that was left.) Karl decided to let the oat grains ripen just a little more than when making oat hay, then simply cut the crop as if it were hay, windrow it, and bale it. In the winter, the bales could be broken up in the mangers and the livestock could munch the oat grains out of the straw or along with some of the straw. What they didn't eat could be thrown out of the mangers and used for bedding.
Of course it worked. Why wouldn't it? If balers had been invented before threshers, maybe that's the way livestock farmers would harvest all their oats for livestock today.
When my wife and I had a two-acre garden but no farm, we used a variation of this method with wheat. We cut the wheat with a scythe, raked the stalks together in bunches, and crammed the bunches into the little loft above the chicken coop. Every day I'd pull down a handful or two of stalks and the chickens would greedily eat the grains out of the heads. The straw became bedding.
Today I do the "Kuerner maneuver" with my own oats, only not with a baler. I make hay out of some of the oats, and since oat stems dry slower than clover stems, I do not mind if some of the oats is approaching maturity when I mow it because drying will be faster. Then in winter, I throw the oat hay down just like the rest of the hay, and how the sheep go after those dried-in-the-milk oat grains. They seem to relish the oats more this way than when I feed them mature grain in their grain trough. Maybe I don't need my combine at all.
The only drawback I see to this method of harvesting grain is that if the grains are mature in the straw, they might draw a plague of mice and rats into the barn. So far, with our cats standing by, this hasn't happened.
Storing Grain
Storing cereal grains requires considerable attention to details. The word, granary, has almost gone out of use, but when I was a boy, it was as common as the word "car" today. The granary was a rather small building that commanded the center of our barnyard. It contained five grain bins, four of them about ten-foot square and the back room about ten by twenty, all able to be filled to a height of about ten feet. An aisle from the only doorway in front gave access to all five bins, two on each side and the bigger bin at the end of the aisle. The bin walls were all wood. Unlike metal, wood "breathes" and is more absorbent of moisture. If grain were not quite as dry as it. should be (13 percent moisture or less is safe), there would be less risk of mold in a wood bin than in a metal one.
The floor of the building was raised so that it would be on about the same level as a truck or wagon bed backed tip to the doorway. Sacks of grain or ground feed could then be moved on and off the beds more easily. But there was another practical reason that the granary floor sat well off the ground. Dogs, cats, chickens, even humans if necessary could get into the crawl space under the building. This greatly discouraged rats and mice from making their homes there. The supports upon which the building sat were originally sheathed in tin to further discourage rodents from climbing up and gnawing holes through the floor.
Shuttered window openings were built into the wall above each bin, so that grain could be shoveled in from wagons pulled alongside the granary. The inside aisle "doors" of the bins were made up of individual boards that fitted into slots on each side of the opening, and were added or removed as the level of grain in the bin rose at harvest and then fell as the grain was fed. Before new grain was added to any bin it was cleaned out and treated with insecticide to kill all weevils that might be present (malathion was, and is, effective, and safer than fumigants used today). A standing rule was never to allow old grain to stay in a bin over one year. Weevils would be more apt to become established in that old grain and would be exceedingly difficult to exterminate even with fumigation. Although highly toxic fumigants are used widely in commercial grain storage apparently without harming consumers, I am glad I eat mostly my own grain. What we eat, about a bushel a year, we store in the freezer which insures no weevil infestation. We thoroughly clean out and spray with household Raid the bins where the animal's supply is kept. If you do not want to be an organic heretic like me, you can try diatomaceous earth, the prescribed organic remedy. Be sure to get the insecticidal kind, not the kind used in swimming pool filters. If diatomaceous earth doesn't work for you, don't blame me.
One of the sins of my young and foolish manhood was to tear the granary down. The building was still in perfectly good shape, but it did not fit into our new and glorious plans to become large-scale, agribusiness dairy farmers with a hundred cows. The granary was not large enough to handle that much grain and so it had to go. My granary today is much smaller than the one I tore down. It consists simply of two bins made of plywood, built into the front of the corncrib. I also store oats and wheat in steel barrels if I k
now the grain is very dry.
I describe the fine points of a traditional granary because, though "obsolete" in modern farming, it is still most suitable for the cottage farm, the size and number of its bins depending on the number of animals on the farm. In it can be stored any of the cereal grains: oats, wheat, rye, barley, buckwheat, and I suppose rice although I have no experience with the latter. The farmer could store in his granary any smallsized seed grown and harvested in the same general fashion as the cereal grains, including soybeans, dried beans like navies, grain sorghum, sunflowers, amaranth-just about everything except corn, which on the cottage farm is, or should be, harvested on the ear and stored in airy cribs.
I have not said much about straw but this, too, is an essential "crop" for husbandmen. You must bed your animals with something, and while I understand that shredded paper is okay for bedding now that we need to recycle everything, paper isn't free and your own straw more or less is. Instead of having to buy bedding, you have your own as by-product to the grain, and then you haul it back out to the field, laden with manure, for the best fertilizer in the world.
Try to haul your manure in late summer or fall, not on frozen ground, so that when rain falls, the nutrients soak readily into the dry soil. Or spread it on the old hay field right prior to plowing it under. If you have a good spreader that breaks the manure up and is able to spread it thinly, applying it to the new seedling clover after wheat or oat harvest not only gives nutrients to the legume but acts as a moisture conserving mulch. It can be applied to newly seeded corn fields or wheat fields as well for the same reasons, and to alleviate crusting on clay soil, should a hard rain fall before the seeds come up.