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Dehuller/Flour mill

Complete step by step plans for building a bicycle powered dehuller that is also convertible to a bicycle powered flour mill.

Complete plans for building a bicycle powered fanning mill. The fanning mill sorts, cleans, and grades seeds with two shaking screens and a winnowing tower. It is adjustable for all sorts of crops and operations. It can clean up to ten pounds per minute.

Bicycle Powered Thresher

Complete instructions for making a bicycle powered thresher. Thresher works on various crops including dry beans, wheat, rice, rye, einkorn, and lupine. Threshes about one pound per minute. This is the first of three tools for small scale grain processing designed to allow small farms to dabble in grain. The other two tools are the bicycle powered fanning mill and the bicycle powered de-huller/flour mill.

bicycle powered thresher,fan mill, and dehuller

Links below to the complete plans for bike powered tools for small scale grain processing; a thresher, a fan mill/winnower, and a dehuller/flour mill. The plans guide a farmer or a fabricator through step-by-step instructions using wood, metal, and scavenged bicycle parts. The cost of materials is $200 per machine and the machines process about 1# per minute for each process. In a well equipped garage/shop the machines can be built in 20-40 hours each.

Root Washer

An open-source root washer that can be built sturdily with NO WELDING. Thanks to SARE for helping make this project happen!

Black Soldier Fly as a Feed Alternative for Aquaculture

Main Street Farms received a SARE Farmer grant for on-farm research of Black Soldier Flies larvae (BSFL) as an alternative food-source for aquaculture and livestock. We plan to raise and breed BSFL in a heated green house year-round to find the ratio of pounds of larvae to pounds of food waste can be produced in a given month. The larvae will be fed cafeteria food waste, coffee grounds, and compost from other areas of the farm.

Weed Weasel Electric Walking Tractor

Complete step-by-step plans for building this light electric walking tractor for cultivation and other tasks. Weeding, cultivation, blind cultivation, stale bedding, light tillage, and more with this one horsepower electric machine.

Livestock Manure Fuel Briquetter- The BioBeast

Rose Marie Belforti was interested in finding ways to manage excess livestock manure on her small farm. She wanted to design and test a prototype of an affordable hydraulic press scaled for small farm use that would sufficiently compress a raw manure/bedding mixture into brick form to be used as a heating fuel. Belforti received a SARE Farmer Grant last year to design and construct a hydraulic press to form fuel briquettes from livestock manure and to test them. The machine, dubbed the "Biomass Beast" by Rose, was built for $2,375 and Rose demonstrated production of briquettes at a rate of 90 dry pounds per hour for 3 cents per dry pound. The briquettes were found to have 6,481 BTU/lb (at 10.5% moisture content) which compared favorably to dry cord wood (e.g. 5,649 BTU/lb for sugar maple at 10% moisture). They burned easily and well. All in all, the cost of production and the heating value suggests that these briquettes deliver energy at a cost of about $4.4 per million BTU (roughly the equivalent of $105 per cord of firewood or $0.60 per gallon of fuel oil).

Sinking shellfish bags for polyculture of Oysters and Clams

A sinking clam bag/longline system designed to sit in the sediments below a floating subtidal oyster farm- allowing for increased use of vertical water-column.

FARM DATA

FARMDATA is an internet based smartphone compatible records management system for produce farmers. Focus areas include field and greenhouse plantings, harvest, pack, inventory, distribution, e-invoicing, labor tracking, fertilizers, compost, cover crops, tillage, irrigation, scouting, spraying, and seed orders. The goal of FARMDATA is to replace clipboards and paper records across the produce farm, from the field to the packing house and beyond. More importantly, FARMDATA is designed to save growers valuable time both during the busy growing season and in the winter when planning for the coming year. FARMDATA improves record keeping by using “smart” data entry forms that minimize user errors, perform calculations automatically, and store useful crop production information.