Simple Stripper Grabs Tough-To-Harvest Seed

Simple Stripper Grabs Tough-To-Harvest Seed COMBINES Accessories 30-5-11 Hairy indigo - a coarse legume that can grow to 5 ft. tall - makes great feed for cattle thanks to its 16 percent protein stems. Growing it is easy, too, but the seed is expensive at $85 for a 50-lb. bag. The seed can be harvested and saved before the crop is cut, but it's murder on combines. "I couldn't get anybody to combine it," says Bernard Boston, a north central Florida cattle producer. "It grows like a bush with stems the size of your finger. It blooms, and then seeds grow up and down the stem. It will beat a combine to pieces." If he wanted to save seed, Boston realized he needed to build his own seed stripper. His solution was a simple framework of 2 by 4's that he could bolt to the front of his tractor in place of weights. Attached to the framework is a rounded galvanized tin bucket to catch seed, stripped off by an old combine cutterbar that's attached to the front edge of the bucket. The entire unit is about 8 ft. wide. "The tin seed catcher and the cutter bar are mounted at about a 45? upward angle," explains Boston. "As the stems slip through the sickle bar, the seeds are simply stripped off." The system is simple and requires a little hand labor. At the end of each row, Boston scoops the seed into a sack. A simple 4-sided platform on the tractor's 3-pt. hitch stores sacks until the field is finished. Boston used to interplant the indigo in cornfields. After the corn was picked, he would cut the indigo and bale it along with the corn stalks. "Cows loved it and would eat the indigo stalks," says Boston. "Now I plant it with rye. The rye comes up first, and I turn the cows in to eat it. Then the indigo comes up, and I harvest the seed before cutting the field." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Bernard Boston, 2419 NW 117th Pl., Branford, Fla. 32008 (ph 386 935-1339).

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