BEAN CLEANING. 197 



weather beans can be tramped well, the pods being dry 

 and brittle, while the vines are still green and tough, a 

 condition in which a machine cannot work in them at all. 

 The energetic farmer can thus often secure a large por- 

 tion of his crop before a machine could thresh them even 

 if he could get it. So it will probably be many years be- 

 fore tramping is entirely abandoned. 



Machine Threshing. For many years attempts have 

 been made to use modified grain threshers for separating 

 beans. At first there was too great a percentage of 

 cracked beans, but recently machine work has become 

 more satisfactory. In the case of one grower farming 

 2300 acres to beans in Ventura county, the threshing ma- 

 chine used is a large "Minnesota Chief," which is 

 equipped with a good engine and thirty men. The beans 

 are gathered into header wagons, with beds ten feet wide 

 and sixteen feet long. One side of the bed is considerably 

 higher than the other, and a large and strong net is spread 

 over the entire bed, fastened on one side, and into which 

 the beans are forked. This is driven to the threshing ma- 

 chine, where a derrick lifts up the lower side of the net 

 and tumbles the contents onto a large platform, after 

 which the straw and beans are fed into the machine with 

 pitchforks. It requires eight header wagons to keep the 

 machine busy. Fifteen hundred sacks, averaging seventy 

 pounds each, or one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, 

 are considered a good day's work. 



The machine-threshed beans have also to be recleaned 

 before they are marketed, and are broken so much that 

 they are never fit for the seed trade. Yet there is one 

 great advantage with the steam thresher. The rainy season 

 is approaching, and a shower is lable to fall in October 

 while the threshing process is in full blast, so that any 

 beans that are caught on the floors are ruined if they do 

 not manage to cover them in some way, while by the ma- 

 chine process all beans are sacked as they are threshed. 



Bean Cleaning, It is imperative now that beans should 

 be put into good marketable condition. When prices 



