Ashburn, GA, (very close to Heaven!) | I worked with some soybean seed producers in the late 80's and early 90's.
> Keep your fields clean of noxious weeds that are prohibited from certified seed production. Common species that we struggle with down here are cowpeas, giant morninglories, and balloonvine. These weeds make seed the same size of soybeans and are almost impossbible to clean out in processing.
You have to keep seed purity and quality up.
> We paid for a 60 lb bushel at 15% moisture, an ideal seed bean harvest moisture. They thresh and handle better there, and with a little air on them after putting in the bin, store well.
> Resist temptation to let the combine "clean your beans." We docked 1 for 1 on weight foreign material. You are better off with an undamaged harvest of seed beans with trash in them that you can clean out than you are with a clean harvest that has cracks or splits. We'd rather have to make some trips to haul off foreign material than to have damaged beans of marginal quality.
> For ideal seed beans, we used to tell our growers to open the concave and slow the cylinder speed on the combine. The seed premium, if I remember right, went up as split percentage decreased.
> Clean your combine, trucks, and storage facilities! You must keep the crop and variety PURE! I've seen growers spend hours cleaning a combine, only to have a field hand load onto a contaminated truck, for example.
> More grower than one told me that, while growing seed beans may be more complicated than oil stock, they learned things that made them better farmers. |
Seed beans
