Local farmer threshing soybeans

I received a phone call from a friend that I should check out a farm south of Kasson where they were threshing soybeans Saturday afternoon. I thought, did I hear right — threshing soybeans? Growing up I helped with threshing small grain with my dad and uncle and also some neighbor farms until they finally all changed to using a combine. I have been to threshing shows in Minnesota where they use the old harvesting equipment.

A group of Amish men from the St. Charles area were helping Todd Eggler, who lives south of Kasson. This spring Todd, and a young Amish man were trying to plow up the five acre field with their teams of horses and a one bottom Sulky Plow.

The field had been in alfalfa for several years. The ground was so hard and when they hit a rock they almost got tossed off the seat on the plow. Finally they agreed it was safer and much quicker to use Todd’s tractor and plow to finish the field. The bean field was then planted with a 2-row John Deere 7000 planter with a hitch attached using a team of horses.

At 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, they started cutting the soybeans with a “grain” reaper binder machine. They would have finished sooner that morning but broke a bolt on the 100-year-old machine. They were hoping for some dew on the plants so it would not shell out the bean pods, but it was pretty dry that morning. The binder swats and cuts the plants onto a moving conveyor platform, then ties the cut soybean plants into bundles with twine and drops them off in rows while moving across the field.

Todd had hauled the threshing machine and the JD diesel power engine to his place. The Amish farmer has a machine for threshing small grain, and one they use for soybeans. They slow down the speed of the cylinder which separates the grain from the stalks with sharp bars. This change in speed compared to the machine used for small grain is done so it doesn’t cause cracking and damage to the bean seed.

The wagons were pulled by a team of Percheron horses and the soybean bundles were loaded by hand in the field, and then brought to the threshing machine.

The JD diesel engine, built on a platform with steel wheels, was used for the drive belt to run the threshing machine. A couple of guys pitched the bundles from the wagon into the machine feeder. There is a conveyor belt with flat chains on each side that carries the bundles into the machine. The threshed beans were run into a wagon while the bean hulls and stalks were blown into a silage chopper wagon, which when filled, was pulled by Todd’s Farmall tractor and spread back on the field. Todd said the yield was about 35/bu./acre according to the machine dump counter, and he used non-GMO beans. Next year he will put the field into corn, and then rotate back to alfalfa the following year.

In talking with a couple of the Amish men, besides crops, they milked 17 cows by hand, had several Blue Roan Percheron work horses, plus a flock of chickens, but they do not raise hogs on their farm. They commented that Todd was doing this harvesting project for fun while “we do this type of farm work to make a living.”

It was a unique experience and I’m glad that I had the opportunity to see the operation in action.