Buckwheat Harvest 2018 at Fobbing Farms

hello I am farming George and welcome to my farming vlog today is Thursday the 27th of September and it's a pretty exciting day because today we are actually going to be cutting our buckwheat which I'm really excited about the first time we've ever grown it and we are growing it for a lovely company called hot rods on the kind of Norfolk Suffolk border but first things first unfortunately we're going to have to clean down the header for our combine and also clean out the tank of our combine so let's get on with that [Music] [Music] so that's the header clean down if you have to look in there not absolutely perfect but it should be good enough so now it's on to the thing that really it's quite a pain in the backside we have got to clean out the tank of Alexian 660 class combine and for some reason they don't seem to include a feature that empties the tank properly so if we go and have a little look now you can see what I mean oh yeah so as you can see we've got little bits of grain all over the place in our tank now if somebody's got some kind of solution as to how mechanically this combine like so Alexian 660 should empty there'd be great but I'm gonna go and fetch my Henry now and sort this out by hand if somebody also needs a better way of getting into the grain tank there's really quite exciting Henry as you can see we've got all of these limited sitting right here and tucked down the back under what is meant to be the outflow will go these are out for the hit at the back and as you can see this combine for some reason does not do a very good job at clearing all of that stuff grain out into the trailer where it should be so let's get busy with a Henry I think I'll get this get this done on my own you can see it in a minute crumbs well that took a little bit longer than expected but what I reckon we're just about okay in here listen Ronit paying down in that little corner there make sure you get as much out as I can say well we'll see how that is I'm gonna go and get some lunch we'll get the head one after lunch and then go never look at going combining [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is what buckwheat looks like it's a beautiful little plant it's got some lovely white flowers and it's actually a relation to rhubarb as you can see from its nice red stem so I'm just gonna walk into this crop of buckwheat here and it's not completely evenly ripe all over but as you can see we've got an absolutely glorious day this is the end of September so it's rather than my sum of your day like this which is yeah fantastic combining day there's a real nice breeze we have been doing a little bit of spraying this morning to get some grass weeds out about all see rape I think that was a little mouse running through then now to be clear I've taken some advice as to how we meant to combine this but quite frankly we have no idea now you can see I'll give it a little bit of a rub out and we'll see what what we meant to be getting out in the combine now as you can see here when we rub out the plant these are the little tiny grains that we get off it it's used in biscuit flour it's officer used if you go to print or something like that quite often you'll find it sprinkled on top of salads if you can switch out the rice in risotto for buckwheat's you can have a buckwheat risotto it's this really nutty delicious flavor the slight problem with it from a growers point of view despite the fact we've got a combine it at the end of September when the weather is not necessarily this Clement it has something called a hull on the seed and what that means is that you don't really want if you treat this seed like this it's got really quite a hard outer casing that isn't very digestible so one of the tricky things thankfully this is something that hundred odds are doing rather than me but one of the tricky things is that they have to find out some kind of way of D hulling this seed to get the good bit out of the middle [Music] [Music] so we are about halfway through harvesting a buckwheat now and I'll be perfectly honest I kind of can't believe how well it's actually going we've seen we've actually got Paul going - now in the combine its lucky we only got a couple of Hector's because the way that the crop is leaning means that we have to be cutting it in one direction which is why he's wheezing back over that way now and I'll actually show you now why it is that we've got to be cutting in one direction just to make sure that we're getting as much of the crop as possible so let's go and have a look at that now so if we ever look here this is the first run down with a combine that we did which is obviously been cut really really nicely and that was going the same direction that Paul is going now they're basically from north to south but if we look over the second run up we tried just seeing if we could get away with going both directions and you'll notice that we end up with little pieces of laid crop here it's not a big deal but obviously there's some seed that we've missed so we want to do our best and try and get as much utilization of what's on the ground as possible although at least the birds will get a little bit of a snack to clear up later on by eating them consequently this is why we've decided that we are just going to be cutting in one direction so that is what we're doing now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well I'm that was quite pleasantly pleasing I think we've got approximately somewhere in the region of two tonne a hectare maybe two and a half if we're lucky so approaching your tongue an acre which seems a pretty good yield that is awfully the wet yield there's a lot of wet grains in there that need drying down so we're going to put this on a blind floor next but if we just turn the camera around we'll see that when you're just on the final run so am but we finished for 2018 and I think I'm going to be quite happy to go it next year as well [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you daddy so it's now six days since we capped the buckwheat and it's been on the blowing floor we actually blew it all over the weekend and I turned the fan off yesterday morning so yeah blown for nearly five days continuously so um let's go and have a look what it looks like now so here is the buckwheat behind me and as you can tell versus what it was like the other day it looks quite a little bit different so I'm if I get my hands in it you'll see what I mean as you can tell it really has dried down really very nicely indeed as you can see nowhere near as wet as it was before it's actually very easy for me to get my hand through it which is exactly what we want so I'm really excited to get this crop to hot burn odds now for them to do their next bit with it to hopefully get it D hold and get it somewhere towards being processed and being used in some food somewhere really exciting

Channel: farmingGeorge

Views: 6,590

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: farming, buckwheat, harvest, harvest18, hodmedods, farminggeorge, farmer, farmingvlog, vlog, combine, combine harvester, claas, lexion, seed, crop, conservation, agriculture, zerotill, notill, zero-till, no-till, zero till, no till, fobbing farms, fobbingfarms, fobbing, curtisfarm, curtis farm, george young, george, tractor ted

Id: EM2jIElmokI

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018