Farm Technology Days

 

Anna Hansen and Audrey Williams

Farm Technology Days

Farm Technology Days is a 3-day event that was hosted in Loyal Wisconsin this year. This is a place for the community to go and see the newest farming equipment in the industry. For a picture of how big this event is, last year they had over 52,000 visitors and 520 vendors. We decided to go to Farmtech Days to try and find out more information about how kidney beans are harvested and how farmers decide when to irrigate their land. There is a lot of generational knowledge when it comes to farming, so everyone does things a little bit differently. Not every farm keeps data on when they water and how many gallons they put on their fields. Each farmer also starts their harvest at a different time, and the equipment that they use varies. We decided to talk with a couple different groups of people on these topics.

Chippewa Valley Bean, our corporate partner, was the first booth that we visited. At the CVB Booth they had a Pickett Equipment Twin Master Bean Combine. This combine was designed specifically to be gentler on kidney beans during the harvest because there is a larger payout for farmers per acre if the skin of their kidney beans is intact. Zach Bacon, from Bacon Farms in Hancock Wisconsin, explained to us that when they first got into Kidney Bean farming that there was a learning curve when it came to harvesting. After a few small hiccups, they found that harvesting slow can help them get a higher quality bean, and a better yield. Regular combines can work for harvesting kidney beans, but they sometimes get smashed, causing a delay in operations. Bacon explained to us that using a combine made specifically for kidney beans made the process go a lot smoother.

The farmers know when the best time to harvest is because their bean plants start to turn yellow as they stop producing pods. How yellow and dry they let them get varies depending on the experience of the specific farmer. They want to wait until the pods 'feel like buckskin', explained CVB agronomist Joshua Johnson. This means that the dried pods feel leathery. If farmers wait any longer, the pods will be too brittle and could break at the wrong time during harvest. However, they can't harvest too early because then the pods won't be mature enough. The process of harvesting kidney beans starts first with a One-Step system, a piece of machinery that uses old school technology to loosen up the roots of the kidney bean plant. The one step system gets rid of the need to cut off the kidney bean plants by hand. Next the Pickett Equipment Combine comes through and pulls the entire plant up into an auger. This auger then helps separate the beans from the pods and other organic material. The beans then fall onto a shaker table where more dirt and rocks get separated from the crop, while also polishing the beans.

            The problem that we were asked to solve is “How many gallons of water does it take to grow a CWT of kidney beans”. Throughout the past couple weeks of research, we have come to find that it isn’t about how much rainfall there is, or how much water is given to the plants through irrigation, the problem that we need to solve is what soil moisture will produce a CWT of kidney beans. This information is very hard to find as not many people consistently measure the soil moisture of their fields, many farmers just walk out into the field and feel the dirt in their hands to see if it is moist enough. This has worked for generations of farmers, and it all comes through experience, however this is not collectable data that can be used for research.

            With that information, we went out and walked around and look at the rest of the booths at Farm Tech Days. One booth that we wanted to look at was Precision Planting. At the Precision Planting Tent, there was a planter that had a probe connected to it that can measure soil moisture. The soil moisture is collected while the seeds are being planted so this machine would be able to give us soil moisture data on the planting date. Another booth that we visited was Valley Irrigation. This vendor sold Aqua Tracs, which can measure soil moisture was often as every 30 min. This piece of equipment can be very useful to see data over a long period of time. Either of these pieces of equipment would be very to help solve this problem so the next step will be to see if any farmers that we are working with have this equipment or see if we are able to get our hands on some of this equipment to find some date.