134 



GARDEN FARMING 



the beans after they have ripened. Most varieties of beans shell 

 more or less easily after the pods have become thoroughly ma- 

 tured. The loss from shelling will depend largely upon the care 

 in handling them during the various operations of harvesting and 

 storing. Most extensive growers of beans consider the loss by 

 shelling which results from the use of labor-saving machinery of 

 less money value than the additional cost of carrying on all oper- 

 ations by hand in the most careful way. In other words, the loss 

 from the use of labor-saving machinery is not sufficient to justify 

 the return to hand labor in the care and management of the crop. 



FIG. 45. Sectional view of a tandem-cylinder bean thresher 



Threshing field beans. Because of the ease with which the pods 

 of the bean are broken and split, the operation of threshing is one 

 of the most exacting in the production of dry beans. In olden 

 times beans were threshed almost exclusively with the flail, and 

 small crops are still handled in this way. On an extensive scale, 

 however, beans are threshed by machinery specially designed for 

 the purpose. The ordinary grain thresher cannot be modified so 

 as to do the work satisfactorily, although it is sometimes employed 

 when other specially designed machinery cannot be obtained. 



The modern bean thresher, a section of which is shown in 

 figure 45, consists of a double, or tandem, threshing machine, 

 carrying one cylinder which is operated at a comparatively low rate 

 of speed and a second cylinder run at a much higher rate of speed. 

 The slow cylinder, which is the first, separates the beans from the 



