 threshing wheat and this last couple weeks I've been harvesting and threshing wheat grinding it into flour and I've finally gotten a system that I think is working pretty efficiently so I'll share that with you later in the video but this whole episode is gonna be devoted to the wheat harvest which takes up a significant amount of time but it also nets us a large amount of calories and this wheat would have been planted last fall when fossil fuels were widely available and then as fast fossil fuels crashed through the spring the wheat grew up and just sat there and was not able to be harvested so I had to come harvest it by hand using using a very minimal fossil fuels I did use my truck to move all of the stuff back to my house but it was only a mile so you know we used a minimal amount of gas really to get this job done and now I am in the process of threshing this is about half of what I harvested so I got halfway through the threshing I'll take you through it as I go but welcome to this week in the food baguette and where we're harvesting wheat I usually don't see me here until the end of the video but I thought I'd jump on just in case there's some new viewers to the food baguette series because of this wheat video and I just want to let you know what we're doing basically we are simulating the collapse of fossil fuels in today's food system so back in January we started weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels as if there was some sort of fossil fuel crisis luckily this worked out really well because we were really prepared for COVID hitting and essentially by September we will be completely cut off from the outside world and the only food that we can add to our pantry will be from what we are able to get ourselves with human power around our house so part of that process is harvesting the wheat from a nearby farm and you may see me talk about how if fossil fuels disappeared this is what we would have to do in actual terms as if it was actually happening because what this series is meant to be is a window into an alternative reality where fossil fuels have collapsed so I'll make some links here you can go back to the beginning and start watching from the beginning if you're interested we have we we have episodes almost every week telling about how we prepared what we're doing and how we're coping with the loss of fossil fuels in our food system which I think is a really important thing to consider especially with the disruptions in the food system we've seen since the coronavirus has been has been happening so yeah have a look back and I hope you'll subscribe and share this with some friends so thanks for watching it's time to harvest wheat this was planted last fall on my neighbor's property but now you didn't have fossil fuels how would you harvest it and luckily I happen to have the tools to do it so we're going to be harvesting about a tenth of an acre and I'm gonna be letting you know exactly how much work it is to harvest a tenth of an acre a tenth of an acre is about 4,350 square feet and it should have enough about eight bushels worth of wheat which will be 450 pounds of grain we'll see how it goes well I've done half a row out of six and I already have a big appreciation for not only the people that could do this well hundreds of years ago but also the modern machines that you know could do this with fossil fuels because it's a lot of work and also a lot of skill so don't take this as a good instruction this is just me practicing and learning how to do it maybe by the by the end of this week I'll have a good good rhythm and pattern down but my goal basically is to use this scythe to cut and cradle as much wheat as I can and drop it neatly into a pile with all the heads on one side and all the stubby tails on the other doesn't always work out it's quicker I'm finding if I make a foul a foul throw to just come and fix it and I'm getting a lot of shatter which means a lot of grain is falling out on the ground because the heads are shaking and it's knocking the grain loose problem is it's grains too dry I should have harvested this week ago I don't have that background knowledge that someone a hundred years ago would have had to know that I should have done it earlier the easy part now I have to bundle them into sheaths and this is dwarf wheat you see how short it is thanks to Norman Borlaug in the 1960s who developed this dwarf wheat we can grow a lot more wheat on the head of each stock than we used to be able to if this wheat were as tall as old wheat was then it would lodge the head would be too heavy for the strand and knuckle it would lodge in the ground and become useless so they shorten the wheat it was a Japanese dwarf variety they broke cross-breed it shorten the wheat and now you can grow tons of wheat on each stock however I can't do what I used to do which was use the stock itself as a binder for a sheaf of wheat or a club a group of wheat that you bind together you just use the wheat itself to do it this is too short so I have to use twine which is kind of annoying but now I have to bind all this together now in days long ago when people actually mowed their own wheat like this this would be the job of two binders for every one mower because you can mow twice as fast as you can bind so usually it would be the husband generally doing the siding the more evenly you mow this the easier it is for the binders so you had to be as skillful as possible not to upset the people that had to come after you and and clean it all up and then the wife and older older kids helping with the binding and the younger kids they'd be picking up off the ground these loose heads and stuff on them in a sack these are gleaning's you may have heard in the Bible or maybe all the counts of agriculture gleaning's in fields this is what you pick up off the ground that's not attached to the stock anymore and biblically you're supposed to leave it for poor people and the birds I may or may not do that I might just pick it up myself so we'll see maybe get some kids out here soon to help me help me with this after about eight hours of harvesting total I have all these sheaves of wheat which are bundles of wheat piled in my garage and I have to process them into grain as quickly or process them to get the grain out as quickly as possible each one of these heads has grains and chaff in them and so I have to essentially do that to every single head to get the grain out the process to get that grain out is called threshing and there's many different ways to do it the traditional way would be to put this all on a on the ground and beat it with flails or have oxen trod over them until they knock all the heads loose or have kids jump on it or beat it with sticks there's all kinds of different ways to do it depending on where you are in the world another kind of low-budget way to do it if you have a small plot of wheat that you want to work is to use just a clean tub so this is a clean garbage bin I have never used it for garbage it's only for food and food related processing if I take the sheaf open it up and this is why it's important to get all the heads on one side of the sheaf and all the straw on the other side so you don't have to go through later and pick through and make sure that it's a line see here I have to turn grab all these heads and turn them around so that they're all aligned to one end this increase this is what really increases the time to process so it really behooves you to make sure you align all the grain really carefully in the field to save yourself time later and then really I just take these heads of grain and beat them beat them on both sides and you can see the grain is are still here but there's no grain left in them all of the very dry seeds have dropped out so now that's just straw straw straw is when it doesn't have any seeds in it hay is when it does so now it's straw this is hay and this is straw technically speaking so we could do that a lot but I've built a flailing a flailing machine basically that can be run by bicycle I'm gonna use a motor an electric motor because it's just me you need two people to operate if you run it with a bicycle but it's right behind me here so let's have a look at that so over here I have essentially what amounts to a large octagonal drum and right now I have it set it this can close but right now I have stops in here and I'll show you why later so what you can do is put in your wheat here close it latch it and then ride a bicycle and it turns a series of flails and shot inside and I'll show you that in a minute I have it set up right now with this opening so that I can let it run and I will stick the sheaves of wheat in as you'll see but this is a little bit of a modification to run as a one-person operation as opposed to a two-person operation you could run it as a batch meaning you put it in run it for a set amount of time and then clean it out I'm gonna run it continuously and just keep putting heads in until it's full so what this is essentially is a central axle with these flails that spin in kind of a worm pattern so it pushes everything this way and then this the seeds and chaff fall down this this open slot in the in the on the side so I add things over here and that gets beaten as they move down and then I have to clear out all the straw and the excess chaff but most of this or almost all the seeds and some of the chaff falls down through this gap and you're not supposed to run it with it open but we'll do it here just for fun so you can see now this gets to be very dusty so I'm gonna wear a respirator and I'm gonna tie my hair up with a bandana to keep the dust out of my hair that here comes a respirator which makes it a little hard to talk plus it'll be loud anyway but essentially what I'm gonna do is take from my wheat over here and then as this is spinning put the heads of grain in and those flails will knock the wheat right off of it then I can pull the straw out and put it in that waiting wheelbarrow so here we go okay so my respirator off okay so now that I've run it in here we've got stuff on top I can just take out because all the grain just fall into the bottom so I can pretty safely just grab this stuff check it out what's left in here it's just grain I'll just sweep all that grain ready for the next batch underneath then is the bucket now this is full of chaff and seeds so I'm gonna run it through a sorter and then we'll do some winnowing and we'll do some winnowing to get to the grain and now we have the sorting machine which is a series of boxes basically with different sizes of screening them from quarter inch to eighth inch to window screen below and each one is gonna separate out different sizes of seeds or chaff and what I want is to save everything that comes out of this gap so at the bottom of this chute I have a bucket that will catch hopefully most of the grain that's gonna come through so let's have a look to see here and now I can use on the side here I've got a handle now my angle isn't very steep so I get a lot like it's stuck up here and a lot of this is chaff but we'll get rid of that on the next go through all right now I have my bucket of mostly similar sized chaff and then underneath are a whole bunch of seeds that are kind of hard to see okay and now I have a whittling tower so essentially what this is fan sucking in air it blows it up this tower and then back out so there's a good wind coming out right here now what happens is I pour the chaff and the wheat into this hopper and it has a little door that a choke door that I can adjust here so it'll just let out a trickle of the chaff and the wheat and the seeds will drop down in here and as they drop the wind will blow the chaff up and out and down here the heavier wheat seeds will fall and drop there's a screen here that catches them and then drops them into this bucket this is a more a fancier way to do it than you could I could just sit with a bucket underneath the fan and then pull the other bucket that needs a lot more attention and time this only should take one or two passes and the grain should be clean at this point it's pretty clean that some here I've finally gotten a system that I think is working pretty efficiently so I'll share that with you so the first step I take is I use my trusty threshing tub here and I grab a sheaf of wheat and you know I've done this different ways and other parts of the videos you'll see where I can feed this directly into my thresher but I'm finding this to be a more efficient use of my time so what I do is I hold it over my bucket by straddling it and then I just cut the heads off now if this wheat has been bundled really nicely and all the heads are on one side I can get by with just cutting the top half or so of the the sheaf into this bucket but in many cases I end up having to cut this wheat into quarters and just throw it all in because the heads get dispersed throughout the entire length of the sheaf in future years I might make more effort to make sure that everything is aligned in the field because that would mean I have to thrash half the amount of wheat or half the amount of straw so I still have a lot of heads in here sometimes if there's only a few I'll pick them out so now I take this bucket full of cut up straw and drop it into my thresher and I can do about half a sheaf at a time otherwise it gets overloaded and it won't thrash properly there's not enough space in there close that up turn on two switches I turn on the fan which I'll show you in a minute the fan blows the chaff away as it falls out from underneath saving me the winnowing step that you've seen elsewhere in the video and then I turn on the motor 30 seconds seems to be about plenty then I can check look through and find some heads and just give them a feel if I try three of them and they're all fresh then I consider it to be done yep all the heads are off so now this just goes in my and the process continues I'll add more through the thrashing machine and start it back up so what happens here is wheat and chaff fall out of this this vent here in the bottom of the thresher they hit here and the chaff is blown away by this fan which I have on running on the high speed this is a trash can lid this is my food trash can that never actually uses gets trash on it it's just a big container of food safe plastic that I keep clean and this ends up obviating both the sorting that you saw as well as the winnowing for the most part I'll have to winnow it a couple times but I don't need to use my big winnowing tower I have all this extra equipment that I don't actually need to use now so that's fun anyway so here let me turn this on and we can see it in action and there's a little bit to toss out but for the most part this does a pretty good job with about 80 to 90 percent of the chaff I usually have to deal with so makes pretty clean and pretty quick work of the rest of the winnowing process I take the half winnowed bucket or lid and pour it into a bucket and then later I'll winnow this for the small amount of chaff that remains in here not fully clean but pretty close just a couple of rounds of winnowing we'll get that ready to use and now I'm in the garage I'm building a stand that's gonna go behind my stationary bike to grind wheat and other things into flour or other ground seeds mounted here V-belt that turns down there so what I need to do now is connect the belt so this is a variable length belt because this is kind of a long connection it's about seven feet of belt that I need and most belts aren't seven feet long plus I'd have to cut a hole in this to get it through so this variable length belt just seemed to be like the best solution to all my all of life's problems other than the fact they're kind of annoying to get set up but once they're set up they're great they have less vibration supposedly than a regular belt and again this is not a how-to blog so I'm not going to go through the exact way to deal with these belts because there are people with more expertise on them than me but suffice it to say it's a whole bunch of links a polymer plasticine type thing and they link together in a pretty clever way got two there links through it's got little notches and they're pretty cool so look up a variable or a linked V-belt on YouTube and you can find all kinds of videos about how they work and what they're about I'll link to one here if I get around to it all right the nice thing is I can put it right through a hole without cutting a slot right because I have it in a closed hole in the wood the fewer openings I have the less place for flour and other bits to get everywhere because everything that gets covered in flour will attract rodents and then once you get rodents you get feces and urine and then it makes it unsterile and unfit to use so I really do want to keep this stuff as cleanable as possible and having a more enclosed hell is it housing is one way to do that there we go let's see hey turn the right way and everything now we have to limit this to 300 rpms so now I need to count how many rpms this takes for every spin of this cool it's only five that's awesome that means I can turn at a much more comfortable pace oh yeah that's much better than using my arm and now I take that cleaned grain that I just cleaned all these bits of of wheat and I'm gonna put them on top of this hopper and fit these stainless steel burrs on my mill and I've kind of jerry-rigged a little hopper with a spout here it could be a little more permanent once I get it exactly how I want it but for now I'm gonna do with with this and again this can be run by a bicycle and all winter I anticipate I will be running it with a bicycle so I can have some exercise when I'm stuck inside on the snowy snowy days but for today I'm gonna run it on an electric motor powered by our solar panels and battery so now I will fill this hopper we've got three quarts of grain now usually I'm only gonna grind this right before I use it so I'm about to use this flour otherwise I just keep it in the berry form in these buckets in my basement but since I'm gonna use this flour I'm gonna grind it now that's time to use the flour and so this is so the flour I ground and this is not whole wheat flour this is whole grain flour and I'm finding that it is much more difficult to bake with than white flour that you buy at the grocery store the main reason is when you're baking with white flour and you need it right we all most of us know that needing it forms the gluten which are chains kind of think of them as like elastic bands that form in the structure and that's what gives it that that bready consistency that we like the bran and the germ and the other things that are left in the flour act like little glass shards so imagine you have a bowl full of rubber bands that you want to make the gluten right and then you throw a bunch of glass in there and you need it it cuts all those bands to bits and so you don't have that nice gluten structure that you generally would want so I've had to adapt and I still don't have a good handle on baking with this yet so I'm still learning one tip that I did learn is that when you mix it instead of putting your water and your flour together and mixing right away you want to let it sit for about ten minutes and that weakens and breaks up the brand and the other bits that would otherwise break the gluten down it causes them to soften and breaks less of your gluten so that's one tip I've learned from the internet but I saw a lot of adjustments to make in my usual bread making process so I'm just gonna make a simple sourdough and here I have my sourdough starter that I mixed last night it's active so I'll take my mixing bowl my scale and now I'll add pound and a half of the whole grain flour and I'm gonna add a half a pound of white flour just to give me a little extra wiggle room and then I'm gonna add four ounces of this starter into a well in the middle and then a tablespoon of salt and since this is a two-pound loaf I'm gonna do about 70% hydration so I will add a pound of water it's 50% and then another five ounces of water and then I'll mix that up really lightly just so mixed in and then I'll let it sit for 10 minutes before kneading all right it's been 10 minutes and instead of just letting this mixer run or kneading it continuously I'm just going to knead it for a minute and let it rest for a minute knead it for a minute let it rest for a minute that if in effect has the same effect as kneading it for 10 minutes if I do that on off on off for 10 minutes it's gonna be the same effect now instead of using my usual kneading method it's risen some I'm going to just stretch and pull the dough trying to build up the gluten and the structure if I need it I'm afraid I'm going to overwork the dough really easily just because of the the different nature of this so just draw and pull over and let that do a little more rising now boiling up a pan drop the dough into it now that it's risen again never mind the noise of the fire truck being pushed around the floor over there so the goal is to give this a little bit of a structure so I'm using the pan I haven't gotten to the point where I have enough control over this dough to make a freestanding loaf but hopefully the pan give this enough form that it will keep all of its nice bubbles inside let's see if I can shape this thing it's pretty wet and I don't want to overwork it because we'll just tear all the gluten I guess I could challenge reduce the challenge on myself by making a drier loaf but all right let's get a flour covered tea towel over that to rise they also say that it's possible to sieve out white flour from this and you lose about a third of the content so I haven't tried this before but let's see yeah that would do it so here's all that bran and germ and other things left over from the grinding process so I can make bran muffins and other hearty things by adding that back in and then here's the white flour oh yeah definitely so maybe I will try baking with the white flour some day but for now let's mix it all back in okay it's as risen as it's gonna get 425 and fingers crossed well definitely not my greatest loaf of bread needs workshopping to work with this new flour oh yeah for sure yeah it's just that so used to cooking with baking with regular flour I did I did try and sift some of it out and I totally can do that so I just same same thing it's it's all that sharp you know the bran and the stuff in the gluten you know I should do is try and do justice all sift an entire loaf and do just white bread from the stuff that I've harvested just to see how that goes and then I'll have all that brand we can do things with like I don't know brand muffins which are yummy melt it over the sides and now it's stuck in here this one took a beating oh I mean the bread and the the crumb itself looks fine but the top well that was not my finest baking hour I used to work in a bakery I can actually bake bread and I have other videos that I'll link to here and here about making sourdough starter and also baking baking bread so have a look at those for a little more successful yeah a little more successful baking yeah well that's all we have this week thanks for joining us for this episode of foodmageddon I hope you learned a little bit about what it takes to process wheat into flour and the amount of work we take for granted when we buy a 10 pound bag of flour at the grocery store it we've been a this has been a goal for me for for years to do this so I've been really excited and enjoying it for the most part but I imagine that if I had to do this every year it would be it would become quite the chore anyway thanks for watching again don't forget to subscribe share this with your friends post us on social media you can find us on social media we're at low tech Institute on Facebook Instagram on Twitter we're low underscore techno you can find our podcast the low tech podcast on Apple iTunes Google Play Stitcher and others you can reach me I'm Scott at lowtech Institute org which is also our website lowtech Institute org we have a blog we have all kinds of different projects going on and we're doing a beat breeding project we have lots of other things right now I'm writing about COVID-19 in the long view of history on our blog I've been doing an essay series where I'm adapting a book I wrote why did ancient civilizations fail to look at our current situation with the pandemic to kind of put it in global historic and prehistoric perspective so check that out at lowtech Institute org thanks again for watching stay tuned for next week we'll be back to our regular program where we're working in the garden largely harvesting cucumbers and tomatoes I think next week so stay tuned for that thanks for watching and take care of yourselves