OATS!! Small Scale Harvest, and Processing.

            Most people thinking of hacking as longs nights in a dark room in front of computer screens. Or a long day sitting working with oscilloscopes and soldering irons. But in my view that is only part of it, Sometimes hacking looks like this:

Cutting the heads off of the oats for harvest. 

According to my Dad this cicle has been the family for over 100 years.
Credit: Andrea Parrish

This what it looks like to harvest oats by hand. Today I'll talk about what I like to call "farm hacking." Farmers have been doing it for ever and I would like to share my modern twist on it.

Why Oats?

So why did I plant oats? Well, for a lot of reasons. In the last few years I opened up more land on my property to farm. I did this for a few reasons, A: I hate grass, B: I wanted my land to be more productive than just some place to dump water and get useless green stuff. So I opened up part of my front yard, and a sizable part of my back yard. That was 8,000 square feet of open land that was just about dead from over farming and too many years of fertilizers. After a year of trying to keep the ground bare, which took lots and lots of hours and didn't work, I figured there had to be a better way. A lot of research I did pointed to cover crops being the best bet. The idea is that no matter what you do, if there is open soil some thing will grow there. So you might as well make sure it's what you want!

I chose oats for a few reason,  they are very fast growing and will out compete most everything else. Two, you can eat them! Oats can be used for bread, power bars(in combo with local fruit), beer, cookies, etc,etc. It's a multifunction crop, because I won't have single function things around my house. In combo with the oats I planted two different clover as well. The clover help because when inoculated with rhizobacteria they fix nitrogen into the soil. This helps to rebuild the damage from over farming which depleted the soil. The clover also make from a great smoother crop as it fills in the spaces between the oats, thus keeping weeds down even better. You clover isn't the best to eat, but it will make for a great grass replacement if I don't put oats back into these areas again.

How to do it.

I have to say out of all the crops I have grown this is the easiest to grow. I used a variety of oats call "Viking" which is bred to grow between two and three feet tall. For the clover I planted Duch white, which is a vine clover, and Kenland Red, which is your traditional looking big leaf clover. I used a grass seeder to spread the seed and small scale to measure out the seed. I did 4 pounds of oats for every 1k square feet, .25 pounds of Kenland red per 1k square feet, and .5 pounds of  Dutch white per 1k square feet.

My Measuring setup for getting my seeding rate right.
I use the canning jars to hold pre measured amounts of seed for each area.

I then roughly measured out 1,000 square foot blocks in the fields and just started spreading seed. I was able to do this in about a days worth of work without too much trouble. I then took my Dad's tractor with a chain drag behind it to cover the seeds. In the areas that I couldn't get the tractor in I just used a rack to cover the seed. Then I just watered and within 2 weeks I had oat and clover coming up.

Oats and Clover starting to come up.

Credit:Andrea Parrish

Harvest:

I stopped watering when I saw a majority of the oats turning brown from the bottom up. It seem to start at the edges of the field and work it's way in. I figured it was near time because they were  turning brown despite water. I then waited about a month before I could harvest. I tested it by chewing on the oat seeds, if they were still soft in the middle, then it was too early. When I was able to get hard seed samples from multiple locations in the field then it was time to go to work.

Now this may have been the easiest to grow, but by far it is the hardest to harvest. I don't have any tractor equipment to harvest oats. Plus many of the fields are too small to get a tractor in so I had to do it all by hand.

Pete cutting down the straw with my Dad's 100+ year old scythe.

Below is a video I took showing the process for all of this.

Results:

After all of that was said and done we found that for the approximate 1,000 square feet we harvested we got about 100 gallons worth of oat heads and top straw. After the processing we got it down to about 10 gallons of oats, or about 40 pounds worth. The seeding rate was 4 pounds per 1,000 square feet, and the yield is 40 pounds per 1,000 square feet. So its a 10 time greater yield, which I'm quite happy about.
In recent days after the first two weekends of work we have had heavy storms and rain come through the area which have put a stop to our harvest. This is because the oats have to be very dry, if they have moisture in them they can start to mold in storage and destroy the crop in the storage container.
For Storage containers I am using 5 gallon buckets with airtight lids, the buckets are then stacked in my basement for storage.

I could not keep doing this without the help of my Pod/Chosen family and friends. Here are some pictures of all the help I've gotten thus far.

Pete and I striping heads off in the living room on old table cloths.

Credit:Andrea Parrish

Friends helping processes oats while I was away on a contract job. <3

Credit:Andrea Parrish

Even the kids get to have fun with it.

Credit: Skullflake Studios

Training.

Credit: Skullflake Studios

Conclusion:

It seems that small scale grain production is doable. It's a great way to keep weeds down, put ground to good use, and have some food security. But it requires a lot of work in the harvest to put it all to use. It is by far something you need a "tribe" to help out with. I am also finding that you are far more at the whim of the weather than with other crops. Over all I think thus far it is well worth the work. I do think it would be best to have oats be part of a crop rotation so that a person can get a range of grains over to time into their stores. All in all, I will see how it works as time moves on.