Cracking black walnuts Farm Scale

I'm going to talk about processing black walnuts so this year I harvested store and end up with about eighty bushels of black walnuts after their Boston halt so it's about a four and a half to one ratio of getting hauled nuts you saw anything about four and a half times the amount of halt halt nuts to get out of the hall mugs so after their home I put them and store them in these bags these are about a bushel and a half the nuts in one of these mesh bags put them in a secure location so the squirrels don't get them where there's a lot of air and let them dry out so I want to demonstrate we're going to talk about crafting and how much cracking you should do to get the nut meat side of these nuts the big issue of black walnuts versus say your California style English Carpathian walnuts is you don't really rarely get full halves on these the nuts stayed retained in that shelf for quite a while they usually come out as quarters but you have to run these and cycle them through the cracker multiple times until you really get all those retainers knocked out of the show so the first time through any of you people and have motorised crackers why various versions of motorized type crackers which this is one that I made my cracker cracks and that goes right down through a sorting table that's where we're going to presort the shells and shelves that need to be cracked again ran through the cracker the large enough pieces are going to fall into this tub the nut meats and the small shell pieces are going to fall out of the shaker table over on this side I'm going to show you a close-up of that later on and then after that's what I called the pre-sorted material then we're going to run up through my air column separator to try to get the majority of the shells out of the other remaining nut meats then later we just hand swords so a bushel black walnuts is 40 pounds dry roast is 40 pounds we're going to start running them through the cracker right now okay this assortment here our has been rancher twice already okay so you can see that running a high volume of them through some of these nutmeats end up falling into this tub but subsequent run through is these nutmeats will end up getting sorted out I'm going to show you over here this is why I call the free sorted material look real close large percentage of nut meat porters and this is the stuff that will get ran through the this will get ran through the air separator okay and will lose almost all these nut shells once I ran through the the air cleaner okay this is three times the crafters and you know a lot of guys that's all they do is run them through three times and right here you get nut piece like this that's a retainer there's a couple good quarters in there still and you see we're just getting started now sure you could set the clearance in the cracker down a lot farther you know against the crowding plate so it cracks up a lot more aggressively but then you're gonna get a lot of shatter you're gonna be grinding nuts up you're not going to be getting nice quarters like this here's our sorted material look at that some nice quarters in there you're gonna see we're gonna get a lot more quarters probably gonna double run that through a couple more times few more times in the cracker and we're probably gonna double this amount there we're gonna weigh this material would we get done try to give you an example the stuff comes out the bottom of the shaker table screening this is why I just called birdseed feed it to the chickens or put it out for the birds I put it off for a wild birds is birdseed and they gobble that off so okay let's get to crack okay as you can see there's still some retainers in here so it's been ran through five times and also I might be running them through a little bit fast if you crowd the shaker table the sorting table some of that you're not giving the nutmeats time to come out there's probably a good nut quarter in there so it's been five times through I'm all right through again and the point I want to make yeah if you have a sorting type table you know if you really want to crack these nuts under on a small farm direct market farm market type scale you need to be sorting as you're cracking the sorting the pre sorting is a cracking allows you to get more out of those nuts get those retainers out of those shelves okay again black walnuts will not crack out like the carpathian walnuts do most of the labor is actually involved in the harvesting curves so put your time into cracking and sorting these okay these are run through seven times and you see we've got a lot of really small shell pieces and there's not really many retainers left in here at all so now let's go over the other side here see what we got you look in here we're going to take this material now let's weigh it we started out with 40 pounds of nuts so let's see what we have of our pre sorted material and the point that I would like to make here is that the reason why you know it pays to crack the nuts seven or eight times through your cracker is if you have a sorting material mechanism to take out all those shell pieces that otherwise have become insurmountable the hand sort it pays to run them through a lot of times a lot of people will run through a crack or two or three times because they say that if I keep running out through your cracker I get a lot of small shell pieces and it's just too much to sort out so you know point of this is if you're going to try to set up a farm scale cracking mechanism for black walnuts do it in conjunction with a I'm time sorting mechanism like a shaker table now we're going to take a step further my next video I'm going to show you how I take the pre-sorted material out of the shaker slash sorting table if you will you had to run it through an air column separator it's basically a version of a seed cleaner that I adapted to clean black walnut shells from the nut meats okay let's weigh this and see what material we ended up with okay eight pounds about five ounces eight pounds but five ounces so when you're next we're going to run this mixture through our air column separator and then I'm going to figure out what is the we'll calculate what's the percentage of shells and not me you know how much not me do we vacuumed out of this material and what our overall yield is going to be from 40 pounds of actual in shell nuts kind of break down the what what it all takes to get black walnuts it's a lot of work alright thanks for watching watch my next video

Channel: Michigan Hay Sales

Views: 8,133

Rating: 4.8356166 out of 5

Keywords: black walnut cracker, separating nut shells, cracking, black walnuts

Id: 8XMi4-ZqdEc

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018