Cereal and pulse vegetables harvesting days

In the middle of cereal and pulse vegetables harvesting period, we can say that yields in our area are quite good and therefore the year is acceptable. We already commented in the previous post about the rainfall that this year was looking pretty good. Another issue to be mentioned is that related to the prices of cereals and pulse vegetables, which are completely ridiculous since we are at levels of more than 30 years ago (barley: 145€/ton, wheat: 205€/ton, Mariana vetch: 201€/ton, Eston lentil: 380€/ton, etc.). Everything related to agriculture (inputs, machinery, labour, etc.) has increased in price, but the price of cereals is, once again, standing in the past... a very worrying scenario for cereal farmers.

In our area, the harvesting tasks are being concluded since we started around 10th of June. In our village there are quite a few combine harvesters, all are quite new like the New Holland CR 7.90 Twin Rotor that you can see in our videos and photos, but the harvesting companies are not working with a single client until it is over, they go by zones of the municipal area and when the client has a field by the zone where combine is harvesting, they harvester contact the farmer and pick it up. For some years now, the work of harvesting has been quite comfortable since the company in charge of baling the straw is the one that brings the grain to town with its trucks, so the harvesting tasks, in our case, are done using only our quad.

Below we show you an average of profits that are occurring, in general in our town (dry land). We use Agroptima application and it helps us to do an accurate picture of our yields... but we will talk about that in a future post.

• Barley: 4,500 Kg/he
• Wheat: 4,200 Kg/he
• Triticale: 3,000 Kg/he
• Eston Lentil: 1,500 Kg/he
• Mariana Vetch: 1,300 Kg/he
• Pea: 2,500 Kg/he

The most profitable crops this season have been Planet barley and Eston lentils. In our town it is very typical to sow Hispanic barley, which historically has a very good and very constant yield, but this year they have failed. The triticale is always a very good size, but the yields are quite restrained. As for wheat, the PR variety always has very good results when it rains in May and June. The Mariana vetch is interesting to be sowed but you have to be very careful with the harvest because it is a plant that lies down and the harvest has to be at its best state because if it is later, the grains fall to the ground. Finally, with respect to the pea, its production is low and less and less is sown.

Versión en español.

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Innovating in garlic harvesting tasks

During these days, the garlic sector is at its peak activity with the harvesting tasks. Some weeks ago they started to harvest the spring garlic and now the purple harvesting is taking place. Of course, this is the most coveted garlic in the kitchens of Spain and much of the world. In our area, Las Pedroñeras, garlic is the engine of the economy and therefore is the most careful and pampered crop of the area to have a harvest of the highest quality.

On this occasion we visited the Casas brothers (Gabriel, Julián and Juan) in their facilities and fields where the garlic is planted. They are real garlic farmers and live it with a lot of passion. This year they have updated the harvesting machinery and tasks in order to do it much faster and to be able to store the garlic in their warehouses as soon as possible. Here are the details of the process.

First, they use a four-row Zocapi garlic harvester cutter machine that cuts the stem. This machine has an unloading arm that put the garlic in the trailer. These trailers go directly to the warehouse where the garlic is placed on palots (boxes of about 350kg) for further processing. This process consists of drying the garlic and then cutting the roots before delivering them to the Cooperative, which will carry out the final preparation work before selling them in Spain and the rest of the world. One of the big differences of this new harvesting method is that the stem is cut at the time of harvesting and the garlic is not any day in the field after being harvested, so you avoid problems with the rains that can occur in summer sporadically and usually quite torrential and besides avoid problems of theft that are sometimes quite common. In addition, working with garlic in the stores is always much more comfortable than working in the fields where the summer heat is a factor that makes harvesting and cutting tasks very hard.

We show you a video where you can see the complete process of harvesting and we encourage you to consume "Ajo Morado de Las Pedroñeras", which is undoubtedly one of product to stand out from our famous Mediterranean diet.

Versión en español.

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