Wheat Processing

Continued from “Wheat Harvest.”

You’d think that after doing something for a number of years we’d have it all figured out. Not so and processing wheat is one of those things. It’s a traditional skill for which many of us have some knowledge, but for which finding the equipment and developing the skills are a challenge.

Wheat processing is a two-part job. The first part is threshing, i.e. removing the wheat grains (berries) from the wheat heads. The second part is winnowing, which is separating the chaff (plant waste) from the grains.

The modern industrial-scale way to harvest and process wheat is with a combine harvester. It does it all-in-one (video of one in action here.) That’s obviously beyond our scope, so we’ve looked at the more traditional methods, such as threshing wheat with a flail. The photo below shows two men with flails.

Here’s a good video of flailing in action.

George Washington designed a 16-sided threshing barn. We had the opportunity to see this on a field trip to Mount Vernon a number of years ago. Here’s the threshing floor.

The freshly cut wheat was placed on the floor to be treaded by a team of horses. The grains and chaff fell through to be collected below for winnowing.

Flailing was one of the first methods we tried, with a flail Dan made. The major plus with this method is that the heads don’t have to be separated from the stalks (straw). The major negative is that it is very laborious and time consuming. Working with a team (as seen here) would definitely be faster and more fun, but it would require four very coordinated people.

Besides flailing, we’ve tried a number of other methods over the years as well. The links will all take you to videos to see these in action.

• By foot (kinda like stomping grapes)
• Chain and bucket
• Blender (slow due to small amounts)

Some methods we haven’t tried:

• Grain threshing with a lawn mower.
• With a converted clothes dryer, AKA “Urban Threshing Machine.” Very nifty as it threshes and winnows. 
• And if you think the price might be worth it, there’s also a foot-powered thresher available (scroll to the bottom of the page for a video). $900 plus shipping keeps it out of reach for us.

There are a ton more ideas, just check out YouTube!

What we decided to try this year, was to use the chipper that Dan turned into a feed processor for me. Click here for photos about how he did that.

Whole heads are tossed into the top…

and end up in the barrel…

This works very well, and you can probably see the advantage of not including too much of the stalk. That would mean more debris and chaff to clean out.

The seed heads are now flat and empty, so the next step is to separate them (and any straw) from the small berries and chaff. I did this with my compost sifter / sunflower seed separator…

That left wheat and lightweight chaff…

The next step is winnowing. In lieu of a brisk breeze, I used an electric box fan.

This is repeated until all the chaff is blown away,

and only the wheat berries remain.

Then it can be ground into flour

and baked into bread!

Besides making a sifter with a finer hardware cloth, there is one more improvement we’ll make next year – to add a cradle to Dan’s scythe. The advantage of the cradle is that it causes the cut wheat to fall neatly head to head, making it easier to cut the heads from the straw. There is an excellent video here, which shows how to make a grain cradle, adjust it, and use it.

The only other thing to add is that the bread has the most delicious flavor! The wheat seed wasn’t anything special, just seed wheat from the feed store. Maybe it’s the freshness, or maybe just the fact that we grew it ourselves, but it’s the best bread I think I’ve ever made.