14 
The: Colorado Experiment Station 
THRASHING 
Beans split very easily unless handled with care. Split beans 
are docked on the market. Consequently, tools should be used 
which split the minimum of beans. It is for this reason that the 
regular bean hullers or bean thrashers should be used for thrash¬ 
ing the crop. 
There are a number of manufacturers having bean hullers on 
the market. It is possible by using some of the modern attach¬ 
ments to thrash beans with the regular grain separator. This 
should not be done unless a bean huller is so expensive, acreage 
considered, as to make it inadvisable. Where the grain separator 
is used to thrash beans, special attachments are put in and the 
cylinder is run at a very slow speed. Usually all the concave teeth 
with the exception of one row are removed. 
Where a grower has only one-half an acre, or one acre, it is 
sometimes easiest and cheapest to thrash out his beans with a flail. 
Fifteen to eighteen hundred pounds a day can be thrashed out in 
this way by a single man. 
Very few of the thrashing machines on the market will prop¬ 
erly clean beans for the market. Consequently, machines called 
bean cleaners have been devised to clean up the beans ready for 
marketing. If any considerable acreage is grown, it would pay 
to have a bean cleaner to clean the thrashed beans before they are 
put on the market. Where only small acreages are grown, neigh¬ 
bors might well co-operate in the purchase of a cleaner, as one 
cleaner would do the work for several small growers. 
YIELD ‘ 
The Colorado pinto is the great market bean for Colorado. As 
has already been said, it is grown on more acres than all other 
kinds of beans combined. The average yield of pintos per acre on 
the dry lands in 1914 and 1915 was close to 800 pounds. In 1916 
the average varied from 300 to 600 pounds per acre, with total fail¬ 
ures in some neighborhoods. The season of 1916 was one of the 
driest in the history of the Colorado plains. The average yield 
of Colorado pintos on irrigated lands in 1914 and 1915 was 1,400 
pounds per acre. In 1916 the average pinto yield under irrigation 
was close to 1,600 pounds per acre. Yields as high as 2,000 pounds 
per acre have been produced on the dry lands and as high as 3,200 
pounds have been produced on irrigated lands. These higher 
yields are by no means average, but they show the possibilities of 
the crop when all conditions are made favorable. 
