Yesterday we threshed our trial wheat from last year. This was a challenge. Hand threshing is extremely time consuming and insufficient, but mechanized threshing machines are prohibitively expensive for the small farmer.

A few weeks ago, Ellen Mallory, a professor at the University of Maine at Orono, came to our rescue by letting us know about a very small scale, affordable hand-held combine used by researchers to sample crops. The MInibatt sample harvester is manufactured by a French company and available in the US.

We were taken in by the Minibatt’s price and convincing sales videos, and went ahead and ordered one. After a few false starts - we blame the badly translated French instructions, and some annoying but fixable design flaws - Dave got it working pretty well. Yesterday we threshed all of our trial wheat and barley so it is ready to go in the ground. Oats and larger scale wheat and barley are next up.