Threshing Wild Rye With A Leaf Shredder?!

In which JB and JF thresh wild rye...with a leaf shredder. We also test a drill/bucket thresher and a string trimmer/bucket thresher. Leaf shredder: 1, wild rye: 0.
Podcast: anchor.fm/goodandbasic
Twitter: @goodandbasic
Instagram: @good_and_basic
Music credit:
Funkorama Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons...

[@-Honeybee]

I needed this video today - I find this "back to basics" type of content puts me in a good mood.

[@bwaaadr7623]

I use a pinewood flail on my drill/bucket setup. It's hard on the heads and gentle on the grains. Also I try to limit the amount of hay in the bucket as it kinda protects the heads from the flail. Keeping grains intact is of great importance for me as I'm trying to preserve old grains from my region. Awesome that you found the right tech for your needs though.

[@ProlificInvention]

Could you thresh using a high powered shop vac with an appropriately sized mesh over the hose end which was connected to a hole in the bottom of your 5 gallon bucket?

[@Kineth1]

"using a flail and hitting the heads repeatedly" Wasn't that how the crusades worked too?

[@Kineth1]

Screen door effectiveness: Submarine: Negative 100% Wood chipper/thresher: 80-90%

[@PKMartin]

Yikes, $3 an hour and that's with a machine. This feels like a demonstration of how mechanisation increases wealth - either because grain is so cheap today thanks to agricultural machinery, or because you would be paid so little without it.

[@wobblysauce]

That is a thing about scale... It beats small volumes to not being profitable, though still good to do if you are testing different things.

[@wobblysauce]

Oh... that is not even including the cost of the machinery and fuel to run said items.

[@HippocratesGarden]

A big part of the reason grain is cheap is.. subsidies.

[@BradGryphonn]

Just found you folks via TKOR. I'm adding you to my off-grid and Make Stuff playlists. Thanks for this content. While watching this, I seem to remember a machine I saw on a commune way back in the very early 80s. It was an old round stainless washing machine tub, the type with lots of holes. There was a vertical shaft with a handle that was set up with cross-braces to keep it centred. Attached (welded) to the shaft were a heap of thin rods or blade type projections. It was right near the wheat grinder (I have hand-ground a 50kg bag of wheat seed in the past, yes), but I never knew what it was for. Now I think I do. The people there used to buy their wheat, but they had grown rice on occasion. This was in the tropics where wheat doesn't do so well due to the rain and humidity. I'm now guessing that's how they threshed the rice.

[@MichaelBerthelsen]

A pair of rubber conveyor belts running in opposite directions at a distance slightly more than a single grain, like rubbing it between your hands. With a good blower perpendicularly on it, it should also clean it up pretty good before the grains come out the end. Thoughts?😉 Especially for bigger volumes.

[@GoodandBasic]

I've seen something like that with rubber coated disks for the final heading cleaning. JB

[@ProlificInvention]

I would turn the leaf shredder throttle down to idle or just above.

[@wobblysauce]

Nothing beats wide open.

[@GoodandBasic]

The lower throttle should break less seeds, but we found it also has a harder time with the long fibrous stalks. JF

[@HippocratesGarden]

@@GoodandBasic Maybe, try it slower, but with just the heads and not all the stalk?

[@ProlificInvention]

I would LOVE to see a video of you guys making a DIY Hops cone harvester (humulus lupulus) That stuff takes forever to harvest by hand!

[@jacobhobbs08]

As I sit looking at my trailer full of rye that needs threshed, I thank you for posting this video. Hopefully it works for me somewhere near as well as it worked for you.

[@GoodandBasic]

We had a fire at one point. Be careful of straw buildup near the engine

[@IlusysSystems]

You are doing it wrong! the way to do this is get a guitar amp, put raw material near the speaker, turn all knobs to the right(max) and start playing some Slayer. Should work also with drums or vocals. Bass not so much. Perhaps this is why there's no bass in thrash metal... Edit: Ok 6:58 is pretty close I grant you that :)

[@GoodandBasic]

You know...I wonder if it would work... JF

[@GoodandBasic]

😂😂😂😂😂JB

[@wobblysauce]

You mean to turn it up to 11.

[@jamesrodriquez2863]

Hmmmm. What if you replaced the blade (which is designed to cut) with some sort of flat bar that would beat against the heads rather than cut them? Also, you can buy a bag that attaches to the chipper so you don't make such a big mess.

[@laurin4405]

Clever👌👍

[@mikef5189]

How about a chicken plucker with the rubber heads? Or a cement mixer with some pea rock tumbling around inside?

[@GoodandBasic]

Oooh. Those would be interesting to try. I think the cement mixer would add to much grit (difficult to separate out) if there were gravel. But maybe the cement mixer could work with just the paddles or wooden blocks tumbling around inside. JB

[@thomasemptage203]

This was really cool to see - I definitely want to try this out!

[@josephbXIX]

Great video. Was planning on planting an acre of rye but no one in the region has the machinery. So i thought about improvising some. You just convinced me it is not worth it. Gonna buy my rye, thanks

[@jeffpaetkau6622]

You still have some steps. Malt, ferment, and distill

[@David-kd5mf]

Try a different leaf shredder. Worx leaf shredder from home depot uses string trimmer cords and is a cylinder that drops material down into bag.

[@OutDoorsMan1342]

I would suggest changing from knives in the shredder to blunt hammers from bar stock maybe

[@HippocratesGarden]

Or rubber flappers.

[@charinabottae]

Yes, change put the blades, plus adjusting the spring on the throttle governor to run at lower rpm.

[@ProlificInvention]

Could you thresh using a high powered shop vac with an appropriately sized mesh over the hose end which was connected to a hole in the bottom of your 5 gallon bucket?

[@znerolz]

how about using a flail? :-)

[@WizardOfWhoopee]

Trivia - 2 grains of rye produce a 1oz shot of whiskey.

[@gwc3721]

What brand is that gas thresher?

[@andrewgcrowhurst]

There is this thing that's made in india quite a lot. It would be a simple build based around a 44gal barrel.

[@jsteel715]

Gosh

[@jasono-o7418]

Would running the rye through a huge comb-like thing like the Japanese senba-koki thresh the rye efficiently I wonder?

[@GoodandBasic]

I must look this up. JB

[@theJellyjoker]

Sing a song of sixpence,A pocket full of rye.Four and twenty blackbirds,Baked in a pie.

[@EskimoInAlaska]

wow!!!

[@vacuousssin6552]

Yo dude, the blonde guy in this channel was my highschool science teacher. Wassup dude!

[@domi1347]

why, WHY did you guys trash all of the hay? there is no point as seeds are in the top of it

[@viagra5207]

watch out for sclerotia

[@sunnygopale4070]

I have trashed millet...if that counts 😅

[@codeklopper6790]

Still a nice harvest :) Did the winnowing had any negative effect on the broken kernels?

[@GoodandBasic]

I had a thought about that. I think that's how farmers may have inadvertently selected for better grain. The winnowing process is more effective for fat grains (like the domesticated kind) than thin ones (much of the wild grain). This means that if you plant what you winnow, then the grains will naturally tend to be fatter over time. JB

[@GoodandBasic]

It wasn't too bad with the broken ones though we did lose a portion. JB

[@codeklopper6790]

@@GoodandBasic That makes perfectly sense. Even beating the grain by hand would crush some kernels. It's just like checking seeds if they are viable. The ones that sink are good and the floating ones are discarded.

[@superdupergrover9857]

Did you, and how/who, get permission to harvest the rye? (I mean, I know no one actually cares, but I kinda want to know the best way to not just ask for permission, but get a response)

[@jetownsend1]

You would contact the land owner for permission. Depending on what state you live in, land sales records might be available to the public. Check with your county.

[@dansemacabre3890]

Im found you guys through The King Of Random , and after a mini binge of learnig about roadside rye and how to make use of it , I am quite impressed. Keep up the good work

[@ljk8059]

Rye is it you put out such great videos on such basic subjects, they really are the thresh in this field. Sorry, sorry. ;-)

[@GoodandBasic]

We just enjoy stalking about these things so much, it's a real winnow. JF

[@ljk8059]

@@GoodandBasic :-D

[@skatalite63]

Read this comment if you want to be amazed by modern ag tech. Don't read it if you want to feel good about your day's work. $50 is the retail price for 45 pounds, but wholesale for rye is what most farmers would get and that's only about $0.20 per Kilogram, which puts your 45 pounds at about $4.08 which comes out at about $0.25 per hour (less if that 16 hour estimate didn't include reaping time). But hey, an 8 hour work day puts you at $2 and that's 10 cents above the global poverty line so you're doing better than about 700 million humans on this planet. This US gov report (www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cropan19.pdf) shows an average of 30.9 bushels per acre rye yield in 2018. This website (www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a3-16.html) says that for corn, the average combine harvester can do 8.7 acres per hour (I'm guessing it's similar for rye). 56 lbs per bushel of rye puts the average combine harvester at just over 15,000 pounds of rye in an hour and would do all of the work that you did in just under 11 seconds. Did your 16 hour estimate include reaping time? I did about 15 pounds this year (most I've ever done) and I averaged 2 lbs an hour for all of the work combined and that was using a sickle and traditional hitting-a-pile-with-a-stick threshing. I have maybe harvested and threshed 45 pounds of rye in my entire lifetime so it's pretty cool that you guys did it in just one season

[@skatalite63]

The only way that I can think of where a human with a sickle and stick could outmatch a combine thresher-harvester is in calories expended per calorie of food gained. Threshing probably doesn't burn more that 500 calories per hour but a single gallon of gasoline has about 30,000 calories. This blog post from scientific american ( blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/ who knows how accurate it is so don't take it too seriously) claims that 10 fossil fuel calories are used to make one food calorie. 16 hours of work for 45 lbs of rye means that you only took 0.12 calories per calorie of food created. So if you want to come out of this experience feeling like John Henry having beaten the machine, think of it in terms of net calorie efficiency, because you have a tractor beat by orders of magnitude in that regard.

[@GoodandBasic]

Why do I love AND hate this comment so much...thanks for the info! JF

[@HippocratesGarden]

except.. one is a commodity, and they could probably sell this at a farmers market, in a foody city, as organic, hand threshed rye for like $50/lb.

[@bobbybologna3029]

It's too bad you didn't go all the way and bake it into something for this video or as a mini-series!

[@GoodandBasic]

We'll get there. We baked some with the King of Random. JB

[@simontay4851]

What does winnowing mean?

[@TheCoolestFalconEva]

Winnowing is when a mixture of the kernels and waste materials like straw are dropped through a moving air current (historically the wind). The denser kernels fall through into a container while the less dense waste is blown outside of the container.

[@GoodandBasic]

Separating the grains from the small bits of waste material (collectively called chaff). This is typically done using wind, which affects the chaff more than the grain. The grain falls straight down and the chaff falls at an angle. JB

[@GoodandBasic]

Separating grain from chaff (chaff is the empty husks and straw). The chaff is lighter in weight so it can be separated using a fan or something similar. The fan blows away the chaff but not the grain. JF

[@Kineth1]

all of the above and... You want to keep the grain as clean as you can, because the winnowing blows away the chaff, but any small stones you picked up with sloppy threshing will fall through the cleansing breeze and into the grains. Which will accelerate the erosion of your quern and your teeth.

[@VPCh.]

I can relate to the mask. Pollen allergies are horrible.

[@GoodandBasic]

Yes, yes they are. JB

[@AR-nt5vx]

6:50 how to put more plastic in your diet

[@stephenroberts8361]

strimmer

[@13bloodfist13]

#graindamage

[@bobitzaakanoobulplictisit7639]

Back in the socialist days of Romania, rye was considered a very problematic pest