4' THE PICKING AND HANDLING OF PEANUTS. 



HARVESTING AND CURING PEANUTS. 



In the sections where the bunch peanuts are gi'own the work of 

 stacking and curing is as a rule quite well done and very few are 

 damaged. The greatest injury is found where the runner pea is 

 grown, and this is due primarily to the heav}^ growth of vine, with 

 the pods borne all along the stems, rendering it difficult to stack the 

 vines without a part of the peas being exposed to the weather. This 

 exposure causes the mildewing of the pods and frequentl}^ the mold- 

 ing of the peas, which may be avoided by more careful stacking and 

 proper capping of the stacks with peanut vines or hay. In some sec- 

 tions the farmers pick the peas from the vines before they are 

 properly cured, causing them to mold in the bags or in the storage bins. 



PICKING PEANUTS FROM THE VINES. 



So long as the bulk of the peanut crop was picked from the vines 

 by hand very little trouble was experienced with the breakage of the 

 pods. The scarcity of labor has compelled the adoption of machin- 

 ery for picking peanuts, and many of the machines have proved far 

 from satisfactory in that they break the shells. 



Peanut-picking machines are of two classes: (1) Cylinder ma- 

 chines similar to the ordinary grain thrasher and (2) picking ma- 

 chines Avhich remove the peas from the vines by means of a woven- 

 wire screen. The cylinder machines break a large number of pods 

 A\hen run at a high rate of speed, and since the w^ork of picking is 

 paid for by the bag there is a tendency on the part of the owner of 

 the machine to run through as many as possible. If the machines 

 are not overfed and the cylinder is run at a speed not exceeding 370 

 revolutions per minute the damage w^ill not be great. 



The picker type of machine does not break any appreciable number 

 of pods and its work is almost equal to that done by hand. The fault 

 of all these machines is that they do not properly clean the peanuts ; 

 the manufacturers, however, are now providing a more complete 

 cleaning process. 



Every farmer who hires his peanut crop picked should see that the 

 machine does proper work, that the pods are not broken, and that the 

 peas are well cleaned. The most successful operators of thrashers 

 and picking machines do not crowd the w^ork and are content with 

 turning out 60 to 75 bags a day. It should be borne in mind that 

 peanut-picking machinery is still more or less in the experimental 

 stage and that many improvements remain to be made. For the 

 present the demand is for quality of work, although there is no rea- 

 son why the capacity of these machines should not be increased. 

 Considerable breakage of the pods comes from trampling upon them 

 around the thrasher, and this can largely be avoided by keeping the 

 loose and shattered pods well cleaned up while the work is going on. 



[Cir. 88] 



