[Thulefoth]

I'm putting this thread under "Making A Living" in the spirit of advanced & market gardening and small-scale, diversified farming undertaken with the notion that it might actually contribute to ... just that. If it should be moved elsewhere ... please do.

This post is inspired by the recent interest of akfarmer in scouring the southern ag-hinterlands for equipment to mechanize some of their more onerous field & garden operations.

All I have at the moment is this one picture, but it is hanging around as a reminder of a topic in which I have considerable interest, and some experience.



This is an Asian combine, appears to be attached to a modified 'walking tractor' with a surrey for the operator. It is probably less than 3 feet wide.

The Asians have many tiny combines. This picture came off of the jaw-droppin Alibaba emporium - "Alibaba.com is the world's largest online import-export marketplace".

I have studied the Chinese import-tractor etc. scene, and I have a close neighbor and casual friend who is a successful importer. He formerly acted as a wholesale middleman, but recently moved his business to my backyard (he is a life-long local resident, returning from the city), and is now retailing himself. He can only operate strictly within the strict rules ... cannot for example bring in many of the nifty diesel Asian walking tractors (many of which are now the only production examples on the planet), needs for everything to be EPA'd and OSHA'd, etc. If I show Gary a pic of this combine, I imagine he'll roll his eyes, chuckle real big, nod his head a foot up & down...

But get this thing? Not likely - it was aimed at Asian markets.

However. Some Asian factories produce drop-dead, World War II military-style, shop-manual-grade parts & service manuals for the equipment they sell, of sufficient detail that you could clone (for example) the 1958 8N Ford tractor that they are cloning in the 21st C. I have found "total" diagrams for walking tractors, and other gear, and we may well find "production diagrams" for these combines.

For those of us 'of a certain inclination', this is very valuable information.

There are several miniature combines currently made in North American. All that I have found are aimed at garden-seed producers, University researchers, Corporate ag-breeding operations, and the like. Prices start near $20K and go to over 6 figures ... for a machine you could wrestle into the pickup-bed yourself.

The Europeans have some very small equipment, usually fairly spendy, though not the 'gold-plated hammers' I mention above. In particular, the Ferrari Tractors dealer for the USA harbors a personal passion for private, small-scale small-grains production, posts really good information on his website, and has responded very generously to specific inquiries I have made about the task-suitability of their mini-tractors (for rough-country logging).

Eastern European nations are now vigorously competing with their Western EU counterparts ... and I see undisguised evidence that Ferrari, Lambardini and other top EU manufacturers are 'sourcing' engines, trannies, rear ends, electronics - the works - to the Eastern-Bloc start-ups. Which they sell at about half the price.

(The Europeans still have many 'medieval' farm-settings, laid out for human & ass cultivation, and they also bend over backwards to facilitate the use of tiny odds 'n ends of arable land.)

It is not by coincidence that these classes of machinery aid & abett the rural & remote homesteader.
_________________
~~ Ted

[Freeholder]

That is VERY interesting, Ted. It looks very Rube Goldbergish, but it sure would be useful on a small place. It's too bad we can't get some of that equipment imported here -- they can bring in all that worthless garbage, expensive toys -- why can't we get some truly useful equipment, too?

Kathleen
_________________
I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.
I John 4

[Thulefoth]

In the case of this particular picture, we are looking at two machines. The darker part on the left (actually, dirty-used) is the 2-wheel walking tractor that pushes & powers the orange part on the right, which is the combine.

The tractor runs into import-trouble because the engine has not passed "certification". However, this particular combine doesn't have it's own engine, so it does not run afoul of the engine-rules.

Where the combine-part (which is actually the part that they are selling, not the dirty ol' tractor they hung it on to show us how it looks all ready for action...) runs into trouble is with OSHA-safety. All those exposed pulleys, belts, & shafts will certainly prevent the unit from being retailed. It would also potentially be a violation to hire a person to run a machine like this, say if you built one yourself.

So an importer can't retail a machine that is unsafe, and likely can't sell such a thing unless it has passed a set of non-engine inspections. Also, an employer is regulated in the equipment that an employee can use.

But there is a loop-hole, and in this case it works in our favor.

Typical modest importers like neighbor Gary normally fill 2 related but separate legal roles. They can import stuff that they think they can sell - in which case they are 'responsible' - and they can import stuff that private individuals have purchased from overseas companies - in which case they largely are not.

There are limits to this game - we can't use the loop-hole to bring in uncertified engines, of that I am pretty sure. But there are many products that an individual is free to bring in, which could not be retailed and could not be used by an employee. But the private person can buy them, import them, and use them herself.

The main 'catch' to private-importing through a licensed importer is that the transport of 'client' goods must be separated from the importer's goods. That is, your stuff must be in it's own container. Everything goes in shipping containers, the smallest of which is the 20 footer.

So many importers will help organize multiple private parties who go together to fill a container, and split the cost of it. The container is not really a horrendous expense though.

By going with an un-powered combine like this one, we would avoid the EPA-engine rules, which are the biggest obstacle. Other brands of combine might have better safety features and be easier for an importer to bring in as part of his purchasing activities, and then sell to us. Or, we could bite the container-bullet, team up with other individuals and go the private-purchaser route.

But yeah, for sure Kathleen, the cryin' shame is we can't take a weekend and go haunt the used ag-sales places in Eugene or Yakima and paw over a few dozen of these little babies looking for one our budget can swing and we can keep running. That's what we don't have ... even though there are literally 10s of millions of these machines 'out there'.
_________________
~~ Ted

[Thulefoth]

Do we really need a combine? Mini-combine?

No, definitely not necessarily. They are over-kill in the smaller-scale range. They are also inappropriate for growing many different small patches of test & experiment-plantings. And if the scale of our production grows much, it will out-run the capacity of a mini-combine, which is both narrow & quite slow-moving.

Do we really need some form of Rube Goldberg mechanization? Yes, absolutely, at all scales of endeavor beyond a few square yards of crop. Beyond a few handfuls or pounds of product, the onerousness and the inefficiency of inexperienced grain & seed processing is simply a show-stopper.

In many cases, we would be able to make significant contributions to our household food supply, or even achieve full self-sufficiency in our major diet-staples, at production-scales too small to justify a combine, but way too large to do by hand.

In such an event, the 'combined' functions of a 'combine' - harvesting, threshing, winnowing/cleaning, bagging - are broken down into separate operations. The crop is cut in the field, hauled whole to some form of power-thresher, then the 'dirty' seed is put through some form of power-winnower.

Often, in such a case, it is important to have the stand-alone thresher and cleaner as flexible & adaptable as possible. This is a special requirement, and it is easy for it to slip away from us. We want the machines to not only do our wheat or barley, but also our sunflower seeds, our dried beans, and next year's bright-ideas ... and in rural Alaska, maybe-hopefully, crops of wild seed which we gather for market and then discover must be (over) laboriously prepared & cleaned.

Beginning in the 1960s & '70s, there were several well-known efforts to present basic methods of making this sort of equipment. The Rodale Press Organic Gardening & Farming folks, and The Mother Earth News people are leading examples. Other former and ongoing key players to be aware of include the Peace Corp, VITA, and various United Nations agencies (FAO, esp.).

Combines were of course created by combining originally separate machines that did the different necessary operations. Early versions of mechanical reapers, threshers and cleaners all achieved their goals with very low power-inputs, because they were animal or even human-powered. There were no engines or no suitable engines for them.

In many typical homesteader-situations, it will be more appropriate to think in terms of relatively simple, stationary machines for doing our threshing and cleaning, than to aim for a combine.

Again, there are published articles for building specific custom-machines. These are very good guides for at least keeping us on the right track. In the spirit of cobbling your own, from what you have, there are few 'hard' facts they you'll want to work within.

Threshing needs to be 'vigorous', but at the same time we don't want to break or crush the seeds. Everything that is too big should be screened off, and everything that is too small should fall through an under-screen. Winnowing is done with counter-air-flow. It needs to be strong for the biggest, heaviest seed, but needs to throttle down 'just right' for the little & light products. Fortunately, we can use very simple 'dampers', like in our chimneys, to very precisely regulate our blower-output.

Very often (normally), 'real' crops produce a range of seed-sizes, so a batch of crop-product might have to make several passes through the machine, to get each grade cleaned without throwing out the lighter grades. 'Chips' & 'breakage' are traditionally animal & chicken-feed.

For those who might be inclined to harness a spare washing-machine motor or lawn-mower engine to drive some basic homemade machinery, one of the best guides that I have seen is a 'report' posted by a 1970s VITA-worker. It is a couple dozen small/simple webpages of careful explanatory & design factors, and a similar number of drawings-pages for the actual machine they made. It includes hardcore specifics on how such machines should/have to work.

4 Man Powered Grain Thresher and Flour Mill
_________________
~~ Ted

[Freeholder]

Ted, I hope you are writing articles for Chuck and Jenny's magazine!

For the small area of grains that I'll have, a combine would certainly be overkill (and I have a scythe -- probably over a hundred years old, as it belonged to one of my great-grandfathers, but it still works). But I can definitely see how it could be a very useful item for a larger area than what I plan to plant.

Kathleen
_________________
I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.
I John 4

[Thulefoth]

[smwon]

[Freeholder]

I can't remember if I mentioned it here or not, but I have a pound or so of wheat seed that I plan to re-plant -- I think it will probably take an area of about 500 s.f. or so. We can't eat wheat, but I can feed it to the animals. The only reason I have it is because it volunteered after we'd had the whole place rototilled -- this valley we live in used to be a wheat farm, before it became a subdivision fifteen years ago or so. So the wheat seed had been in the ground all that time. I selected the nicest heads to save seed from, and we cut the rest (fire hazard in our dry summers).

Then I've ordered three pounds of hulless oats to plant. I'm only going to plant half this year, and save the other half for next year. I think I can get around a thousand square feet out of that, but that's only an area about twenty by fifty, so not too much to handle by hand. I'll be interested to see what yields I get. I will be dealing with them as though they are garden crops, so they may do better than in a field setting.

Kathleen
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I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.
I John 4

[Thulefoth]

For those who have gardens but not an 'area' they can field-sow like Kathleen mentions ... I have several times grown an assortment of grains in odds 'n ends of garden-row, just dribbled the seed in a shallow vee and covered it, like typical row-crops, and that did fine. Even just a yard or 2 of row is plenty for a 'look'. There are more than enough plants in a couple yards of row for seed-savers to have plenty of 'breadth' to their genetic base ... and even do a little selection & culling.
_________________
~~ Ted

[smwon]

Thanks Kathleen. It will be interesting to see how it does.

Ted, I have not experimented with grain seed but after reading some of your suggestions I am now going to... thanks.
_________________
Linda In Northern California

[akfarmer]

We plan on using a grain binder and putting shocks in the field. The falls are usually cool and dry and should be good for drying. I hope to market in that form to some degree but have a mini thresher lined up as well. We'll see. First we need to get the grain in the ground. Probably next week end If I don't have to travel.

[Thulefoth]