The seasonal crops we grow are - Pumpkins (giant pumpkins for the seeds), Corn, Beans and Sunflowers (for seeds). This field and the veggie/fruits get most of the compost and attention so we've bought and set up our electric tractor to do 99% of all the weeding with some sweeps and a small bottom plow to turn up the potaotes kind of work. If you don't have a garden tractor now, think about getting one that can run on ethanol.
The grains crops are scythed by hand and give us a good work-out but since it's worked when the weather is nice - and it's less than 1/4 of an acre, it's not as much of a chore as it sounds. Just keep the blades sharp and and put a little music on. Take some water up to the field with you and its done before you know it.
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We also have a trick on the hay baler to collect grains and other seeds. Grains fall off the shaft and are collected in a bucket below the ramp. Its not a huge amount of seed but rather than have it fall back on the field where the birds get it, we collect it for the dairy girls as a little extra energy in winter.
I'm trying the "hulless oats" this year in part of the food plot. So that's exciting. . .to me anyway. We would also like to expand the our bean collection and learn more about how to shell the peas and store them for split pea soup. For now, we shell all the beans by hand but would like to pick up bean sheller in the future.
As for our energy production plantings we are doing 1/2 acre of sugar beets (Mammoth Reds) which we will grow intensively and those should produce about 750 gal ethanol per acre. We will also run maple sap to see the result and because there cattails around here we will run some of those but at an est 2,000 gal ethanol per acre, we will expand their growing areas on our bottom lands.
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