Barley harvest complete

We had to pull out the welder a few weeks back, as we deliver barley direct to the malt house in Nairobi we had to build a screen, I could not buy slotted screens and so I went to the industrial area and bought eight 2 meters by 1m 3mm round hole screens, I had a engineering shop weld two sheets end to end and then they rolled them as we do not have the gear to do this. We then built the drive, installed internal spokes and baffles to retard the grain flow and to maximize the screen area that makes contact with the grain, we borrowed the hyd motor off our sprayer and the loading auger off the simplicity air seeder,these both run of the tractor hydraulics.
After a number of modifications it worked well, we are removing about 1 to 2% by weight, the retention (amount of barley above a 2.2mm screen is running at 97 to 98%) which considering the below average rain in crop is good.
We also last week put a aspiration system on which consists of the hyd driver fan off our simplicity air seeder and a snazzy manifold we built that helps the light material to be sucked off as it enters the screen. 

Sunflowers Impress in Trials

We harvested our trials a few weeks back, the sunflowers did very well, Some results below.

Thomas Blue Field Peas (Dry Peas) yielded 1240kg ha
DHO2 Maize yielded 4200kg ha at 22,000 plants per ha (2.2 per sq meter)
Fedah sunflowers yielded 1800 kg ha at 45% oil
8889 Sunflowers yielded 3200 kg ha at 50.3% oil
Mung Beans (green grams) yielded an impressive 2450kg ha
We still have various varieties of maize to shell and weigh although it is drying down at present.
So all in all some interesting findings, the Mungbeans and Sunflowers were very impressive given these trials had only 52mm of rain in crop (plus a full profile of moisture)
We will plant some 10 ha trials of Sunnies and Mungbeans on the short rains to get a field scale idea of their suitability or not for commercial areas.
Also the Linseed (Flaxseed) and two new barley varieties are still in the trials and we should be able to harvest it shortly when they are ripe. The Barley was planted on a couple of plots that didn't establish (red millet and Quinola) and so we planted them about a month after the rest of the trials, they received 20mm of in crop rain and so it should be interesting just what they yield.