Rice Threshing 2011

My Rice- Koshi-Hikari

Well, I did it. And it feels good. A bit embarassing, but still pretty good.

As you know, this year I grew some rice. The kids and built the paddy, planted the rice, watched it grow, and harvested it.
And now it is threshed and de-hulled.
Here is the story in pictures.

I took the rice off the drying racks and carted it up to the house. That way, I could sit in the sun and work threshing the grain from the straw. I tried a number of ways. I beat it with a stick. I walked on it, but the best method by far was to grasp a few stalks in my hands, and run my fingers from the base to the head. The kernels just popped right off. Of course, this method will be too labor intensive if I ever grow rice well enough for a decent harvest. But for my harvest... Meh.

Here we have a mid threshing shot.

And a closeup of after stripping the grains. Lots of empty hulls and small bits of straw. I then spent a few minutes picking up handfuls of the grain and chaff, and rubbing my hands together to separate them.

Then I winnowed the grain by the time honored method of throwing it up in the air and letting the breeze carry away an alarming amount of empty hulls and straw. After gathering it back up, it looked like this.

And so I weighed it. 1500g. of unhulled rice. Hmm.... 25 square meters, 400 plants, 1500g of rice.... Oh, did I forget? I took it to the big machine in town to have it polished up and the hulls removed.

It came back at 1000g. Yes, my yield was 40g/ square meter.

So if 1 acre equals 4047 square meters, I would have grown  161.88 Kg. of rice, or  356.9Lbs...

(in 2001, the US average rice harvest/ acre was 6374 Lbs...)


All the more incentive to do better next year.
But I will enjoy eating this rice!

My Precious.....