Clean Them Beans!

My family was obsessed with being the best farmers in the county. I was the exception and would have been quite happy to have been the worst farmer if it meant I didn't have to work. In the quest to be the best Dad was always looking for new and better things. His brother/partner was the opposite so massive fights broke out and ended with Chet screaming about how Dad was going to break the operation and we would lose everything. We didn't.

One of the major crops in the area was soybeans. Farmers would harvest and sell them in the fall and take it easy. That wasn't good enough for us and we messed about with soybeans constantly. Somehow, for reasons I can't remember, we became connected with the University of Missouri, Dept. of Agriculture. We gave them land for soybean test plots and helped them take care of the plots. They were always trying to build a better bean.

After a few years the school decided we were the right farmers to grow seed beans so they provided foundation seed to us. We planted fields and fields of beans. If done properly the beans produced from these seeds would be certified to be sold as certified seed beans to other farmers. The bean had to be perfect and pass tests along its way and was inspected regularly but the inspections were never announced. We never knew when a plain blue sedan would be parked at the end of a field. That car meant nattily dressed college professors were roaming around the fields nodding to each other as though they were actually doing something. They never talked to us but we had strict instructions on how to treat the plants and beans and if we failed the beans would never be certified and then all of our work was for nothing. (That happened one year. We failed the germination test and our beans had to be sold at market value. A big loss.)

There could not be one weed in the field and not long after planting, the plants became to large to use machinery. Weeds would grow in the bean row itself and no machine could cut them there. So we would take to the fields with long machetes cutting each weed by hand. It was so hot that we started at daylight and quit at noon. Before the sun came up the plants were drenched with dew and we got as wet as though we were wading in water up to our chests. Then the heat came and drove us out of the fields by noon. The next day we did it all over. Four times a summer. Die, cockle burr, die! We were dying too, at least it felt like it, but people came from all over to look at our neat, weed less fields in wide-eyed wonder. Our chests were properly puffed out.

The beans were easy and fast to combine because they had short stocks with many pods on each stock and because there were no weeds to interfere. Instead of selling the beans like the other farmers with their weedy beans and taking a nap we put them in bins.

After all of the other farming was done and winter set in we went about cleaning those beans. All day every Saturday, so us boys were home from school, we cleaned beans. We had a machine that strangely enough was called a soybean cleaner. It was a system of shakers and screens. We augured beans from the bins into this thing. It shook and clattered and everything that was not a perfect sized, whole, bean fall on the ground. The bean had been cleaned! It and its fellow beans went into a hopper. We manually put a new, had to be brand new, burlap bag under the hopper spout and filled it with ninety pounds of beans. Someone sewed the top of the bag (I did a lot of the sewing.) affixed the purple certification tag and man-handled the bag to the side. When we had several bags we loaded them on a truck. It took two guys to load each bag. Each truck load went to town to a grain dealer who acted like a broker and sold the beans the next spring to farmers. They were just plain expensive beans.

Our beans were known, indeed, coveted and were reserved by the time we knew how many we had. I left the farm as fast as I could but they kept growing and cleaning beans until they all retired.

Great story, Phil.

Do you eat soybeans?

Dear Phil,
I am a new farmer, not any of my family that does this suff with me, have no clue how to sell it en masse, and am about to give up.
I fancied ourselves the new way of farming, hydroponics, invested bunches into it, and find that we cannot compete with the big farms. It is not that we would not sell at the price of the big farmers, but the big farmers have it in a wad. There seems to be no need for a small farmer to even try.

Last year we grew so much food on this little place that we could have fed a community. I canned, froze, gave away, made lots of ice cream, and fed lots of goats for free.

What is your advice.

Love,
Betty

Betty, the small produce grower/retailers that I have known have never made a dime. My uncle was one. He didn't make any money but he did it because he loved it. He was at a farmers market just about every day selling his stuff. And talking. Boy, could he ever talk. There were a bunch of others doing it too. They had a great time but they didn't make any money.

My advice? Do it because you enjoy it. Sell a little, can it, give it away, make ice cream and feed the goats.

Alice, I ate a couple of roasted soybeans and that was enough forever. The soybeans we grew were different from the soybeans the Japanese use.

Phil, this is a great story. I only have one question. If the filled soybean bags only weighed 90 pounds, why did it take two guys to put them on the truck. Maybe you guys needed to work out a bit by loading hay, before you tried the little soybean bags. Or maybe you should have spent some days working tobacco. Just wonderin'.

Lifting a 90 lb bag does not appear to be a problem. Doing it continuously is. More can be accomplished with two people working than one person breaking his back and eventually running out of steam.

Good story Phil. The small farmer always had problems if he tried to compete with the big guys. It was the smart farmer that understood his limitations and made the best of what he had.

I grew up on a farm. It was hard work. Weather was always a factor with crop yield. The good thing, we always had something to eat.

I've loaded my fair share of hay bales, fertilizer and such. But the beans could not be packed-in because of cracking. So the bags were large and the beans loose. You just couldn't get a grip on them to pick a whole bag up without someone on each end. They just flopped all over the place when one person tried to pick them up. Plus, if you got too much weight on the top of the bag the stiches would pull out of the burlap. Then too the bag weave could stretch or tear and open a hole.

We laughed many times at some superman trying to put one of those bags on the truck without help. Most of us tried it to show-off. You would stagger around like you were drunk trying not to drop it. Then, likely as not we would have to re-bag.

I can't remember how much we sold those beans for but it was enough that if you spilled a bag my Dad and Uncle would run around in little circles screaming.

The last time I lifted a 90 lb bag it was cement. I picked it up and put it on a foundation wall about a foot over my head. Then I slumped there and waited to die because I was sure I had badly injured myself.

That was many, many years ago and my whole body still hurts. I was just never the same after that...LOL

My grandparents were farmers, Phil. Their main crop was cotton. The year I turned five, the whole family, my mom and her 4 brothers, spouses, and children went to the farm to help my grandfather get in the first bale in the county for that season. My grandmother made me a special cotton bag in a five-year-old size. I picked five lbs - one for each of my years. My uncles all said that if you went by body weight ratios, that I had picked as much as any of the adults. I remember being very tired at the end of that day. We all were, but we got that first bale. I also remember feeling quite proud of being a part of it all.

Ann

A great story, Phil, and it reminded me once again how wonderful life in the center of a city can be.
In the old days I enjoyed driving in the country and seeing a farmhouse,barn and so on every couple of hundred yards plus woods and fence lines. Today you can drive the same roads and see all the way to the horizon with nothing between except huge fields of one crop or another.

Beans! What a subject. Cleaning Beans what a job.
Got me thinking about what I could have bean.
Where I might have bean.
I feel like a has bean.

How about a Mr. Bean? Hope you don't feel like him.

Where have you bean all my life?

Bean there, done that.

Have you ever read the book, Bean Down so Long it All Looks Like Up to Me?

Haven't read it, but it sounds like a real gas.

did anyone catch this cool little film?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milagro_Beanfield_War

Ann

Betty posted a message about beanfields on the PAMB a while back. Like several of her posts in various places, it prompted a blog from moi:

http://www.annjoiner.com/myblog.htm

See "How much is a Mess?" about 3rd down the page.

(Actually, now, it is the 4th down the page, as I have been prompted by the discourse on railroads to add a new blog entry. It is now the first blog on this page.)

Ann