Farming for self sufficiency

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DRYING

The corn inside this rick will go on drying out, maturing and improving, until you run out of last year's wheat and start threshing it. Wheat thus dries and matures naturally, and is better than combined and artificial dried wheat. There is one way you can get your wheat threshed without threshing it. That is throw it to the chickens. They will eat the grain and use the straw for litter.

However, if you have had it combined you will have to dry it, or to store it in an hermetically sealed container. If conditions were fine when it was cut it may be enough to leave it out of doors in the sun and wind in gunny bags for a few weeks, turning the gunny bags once a day. The bags must stand on boards or corrugated iron; not on the ground. Then take your bags into your barn and store them, not touching each other, and turn them every three or four days. It is hard work. Or you can have the grain mechanically dried by a man who owns a grain dryer. He will charge you for it and you will have all the bother of getting the wheat to him and getting it back again. Or do what our Neolithic ancestors did and keep the grain hermetically sealed. They used to do this by digging pits in chalk or well-drained soil, lining the pits with basket work, putting the grain in and sealing the top carefully with clay. The fact is, hermetically sealed grain generates carbon dioxide which inhibits the growth of moulds and other organisms which would otherwise ruin damp grain. This principle, after having been lost for four thousand years, has been rediscovered in the last ten, and those tall, rather beautiful, metal grain silos rising up near farmsteads mostly contain undried grain, straight from the combine harvester, and are hermetically sealed to prevent deterioration. This grain so far has been used only for animal food: I am not aware that 'moist-stored' wheat has yet been milled for human consumption, but our Neolithic ancestors did it. The Romans built elaborate under-floor flues, in which they burnt wood for the drying of wheat.

The Sinhalese get over the grain drying problem very aesthetically by building the most beautiful baskets of cadjan or woven coconut fronds, some of them as big as houses, and supported on stilts. The paddy (which is the correct name for unhulled rice) is stored in these, and the movement of air through it dries it out. Some African tribes (notably the Kikuyu) store maize and millet by the same method.

But nothing can beat, in the climate of the British Isles, the good old method of ricking the corn, in the straw, thatching it, and then threshing it out in the winter after it has naturally dried. If you have, by the way, a Dutch barn or something like that, by all means build your rick in its shelter and you don't have to go to all the trouble of thatching it. The Dutch have a marvellous method. They put four tall poles up, sling alight roof inside them on four ropes which pass over four pulleys at the tops of the four poles, haul the roof up to the top while they build their rick underneath it, then lower the roof down to fit comfortably over the rick. When they want to start threshing they simply haul the roof up again and chuck the loose sheaves down. They use this system mostly for hay, for which it is perfect, for it does away with the laborious use of the stack-knife, but it works with grain too.

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