Growing wheat for a sustainable retreat

Very neat!

Very cool. I hope to do that someday!

thanks for posting this.more of the same type very welcome and worthwhile ,cheers.

A lot of work and a lot of reward

Great job! Am planting a little patch myself this year. Thanks for the warning;) . How many in your family, and how long did 100lbs last you. how much did you reserve for re-planting.

Did you estimate the cost of growing, harvesting, gathering, flailing, etc. vs buying bulk organic wheat?

Awesome experiment! Thanks for sharing your process and results. Makes a person want to buy 20 years worth and sock it away while they can...

Question on the wheat: how has it worked for bread? Reportedly the climate in the South rarely produces the hi-protein wheat (even from hi-protein seed) to make nice yeast bread.

@tomyhill123 Nope, I haven't had a problem with that the other grasses are too established and the field where I planted the wheat came back totally in grass with no wheat. I believe the wheat seed that was left in the field sprouted but the heat was too much for it and it died. I plant my wheat in October. We harvested in June. Thanks for asking.

@loganv0410 All I know that the wheat makes nice flour and excellent bread. I do not know how to check for or compare protein levels.

@jokertim777 That is what I was hoping it would do! That is, to motivate them to store it up while they can! Pass it on and thanks for watching!

@Richardofdanbury If I did that I would probably have never done it! There is no comparison. I can buy wheat for $17 / bushel and it probably cost me $500 per bushel to grow and store my own. Again, I did it to make sure I could do it if I needed to in a difficult situation. I am testing my preps and want to either get people motivated to put back some wheat or to let them know how to grow and harvest their own. Thanks for watching.

@imstillworkin It is nice to know I am not the only crazy guy doing this at home! I hope the video gave you some ideas. Thanks for watching.

@GoatHollow Thank you and you are welcome on the warning! It was 100 gallons . so about 800 pounds. I could have easily have had a ton but I wasted so much trying to figure out how to do it. There are 6 in my family and 1200 lbs wold be sufficient for us for wheat for a year. I bought wheat as well to make sure I had enough with always having 120 lbs set back to be able to plant an acre of wheat. 1 acre here produces about 40 bushels, 2 set back giving us 38*60 = 2280 lbs. Take Care!

I know I'm gonna catch flak but wheat is NOT good for you. It's also bad for the brain. It's not food it's fiber, which is NOT food.

@pr4runner true on both account! Thanks for watching!

Check farm auctions for machinery. You can always bring the wheat to the combine. You can also use screens to help seperate the wheat from the chaff. Great video, it can be done.

Thanks for sharing, great video. How did you plant the wheat? Did you bury it or just spread out seed over the ground

Nice job. Reminds me my childhood on the farm.

wow there is so much to say but my family was 6 but now it is only my son and me But my boy will not allow being prepared for another bad storm we have gone through four bad storms together He just does not to stay and fight only to lose every thing anyway if any bad starts our way he will book a five star hotel in another state for a week until the storm is over... SAD

You should get one of those older gas powered combines and convert it to run on wood gas.

Just a heads up you'd probably like this guy. Especially if your making your own power and growing your own wheat. his name is Wheaton12's and his video is "grain threshing designs and winnowing" The first design isnt that good but the second one is great.

Great vid, thanks for posting. So you ended up with 100 gallons harvest. How many gallons did it take to plant that plot?

Great vid! GOD BLESS!

Very cool...

Great Vid. One of my you tube ensipirer's (lol I cant spell I know) but over all a great vid.

How about a treadle- (or disused stationary bicycle-) power thresher. A fist-sized shock of wheat is fed head first into a safety-chute which encloses a flail drum. The wheat straw is never released. Only the seed head is submitted to the flail, so the device doesn't have to process straw. The wheat falls down a screen through which air is blown, courtesy of the pedal power, winnowing the chaff.

Ever considered quinoa or amaranth, those seem easier? I don't know much about millet or buckwheat......

that was awsome thanks for sharing brother

Before you broadcast the wheat did you have to till the existing grass under?

If you keep growing wheat you can probably do this with a 2 stage device containing some sort of spinning beater bar and a vortex separator. After the first round of separating the wheat from the shafts you can probably run it through again with the beater spinning faster to take the outer coverings from the wheat. This is just a guess though from my limited knowledge of a combine harvester.

Do you know where I can find a grain mill for wheat berries that I can grind into flour to make bread? The ones I have found are really expensive!! I don't mind used goods as long as they are clean and usable. Thanks!!

Great job for your first wheat crop! However, if you are going to continue growing wheat yearly and harvesting by hand, I would recommend using a scythe with a cradle attachment. With practice you can cut the stalks and lay them in sheaves with a sinlge sweep of the scythe. This accomplished two things. First, the wheat will be much easier to stack and move around once the sheaves are tied off. Second, it will make threashing easier because all the heads are in one general area.

question in making bread, how do you produce the yeast natural in a self-relience (wrol) situation?

What would you furtilize weet with any way

i know this was a year ago but I have a question I got wheat berries from a local farmer right out of a combine. While most of the wheat was sepperated I still have a good bit that has a hull on it,, how did you get the berry out of the hull most of what I got is just berry but I do have some that I would not want to grind did oyu have to sepperate by hand or use another method? thanks for any help you can give

do you do this ever year

Now, to thresh the wheat is not a really big problem, the problem is what to do with the byproduct of the wheat or wheat grass. If you have a pond you can get grass carp and feed the wheat byproduct to the fish another solution would be to grow mushroom in the wheat byproduct the idea is to use all.

love your different approaches to different solving problems. awesome video

Thanks for the idea, it's a great source of chickhen or animal feed also . My thoughts are to grow enough stuff to feed my chickhens. Price of feed is going through the roof. Process it with a riding lawn mower with a bagger attachment!

Thank you so much for sharing with us all.  Please let us know if you have found an easy peasy way to winnow and thresh the wheat :)  Blessings !

Hey Scott, that was a great looking project and effort.  I'm curious about your yield though.  You said you planted 1.5 acres and used 3 bushel of seed. I'm definitely not an expert on wheat yields, but the resources I'm finding on the web suggest that yields should be somewhere to 30-50 bushels per acre for non-irrigated fields.  I know that yields can vary due to the many variables involved, but you said you got 100 gallons of wheat harvest which is only 10.74 bushels.  Any idea why you had such a low yield?  Was there much waste in your threshing process perhaps?  I'm interested because we hope to do some small scale wheat production on a homestead farm in the next couple of years.  Thanks Scott, love your videos!

Forgot to ask...have you considered growing some extra wheat to produce wheatgrass fodder supplement for your livestock? 

How do you prepare the ground for the next crop I dont get that bit lol

I did the math and you should have got about 7.17 bushels per acre

Engineer775. It seems that there is something terribly obvious that we have failed to ask. Do you think? Perhaps because it is your own business to deal with?, but since you made it public? did you expect anyone may ask? worry at least!? I kinda feel embarrassed that we have not. You seem like a great champ and regardless of any hard time you might have had. I am grateful for the work you are putting on, It is inspiring. Greetings from the colony.

If you left it in the hull that's still as fresh as it was 8 years ago.