Threshing & cleaning the beans by hand. Some 120 people from surrounding villages have been employed to do this on our farm this season. We’re busy with our harvesting season on the farm at the moment. I recently posted about our wheat harvest and today I thought that I’d tell you some more about our bean harvesting, and exactly what that entails.
Firstly, all our beans are harvested by hand. This is known as ‘pulling the beans’. The beans are pulled and left to dry out in the fields for about 10 days. Then they are all loaded on to a large trailer (pulled by a tractor) and dumped on to Hessian sacks which are laid out on the edge of the farm fields.
The tractor then drives over them to crush the pods and begin the release of the beans inside them (amazingly, the beans aren’t damaged or crushed during this process !) From here the beans are completely removed from the pods by hand, cleaned and placed into bags.
The bags are then taken by road (large trucks) to our factory / head office in the big city where they are graded by hand before being transported by road once again, to the coastal town (and port) of Tanga, where they are shipped to Holland.
These beans are all used for / sold as “seed beans” and are not for consumption in this form.
We employ a large number of people from the surrounding villages to help us with the bean harvest each year. This season we have employed 120 people (mostly women but some men aswell) who otherwise have no income as the majority of them are subsistence farmers. Apart from their daily wage, they also get to take as much of the empty bean pods home as they like, for feeding their livestock.
Sometimes at night, we get a few sly people coming and putting a herd of 100 or more cattle through the ready harvested bean fields and they eat all the pulled beans (lying in the fields to dry) or beans that have not yet been removed/packed and leave before sunrise so we can’t catch them. Aside from being costly, this is heartbreaking after all the work, time and care gone in to a field of beans like this. No one has fences around their farms here as they are just too vast. Our farm alone is 3500 acres and part of that runs along and across a public access dirt road, so fencing it is almost impossible !
Firstly, all our beans are harvested by hand. This is known as ‘pulling the beans’. The beans are pulled and left to dry out in the fields for about 10 days. Then they are all loaded on to a large trailer (pulled by a tractor) and dumped on to Hessian sacks which are laid out on the edge of the farm fields.
The tractor then drives over them to crush the pods and begin the release of the beans inside them (amazingly, the beans aren’t damaged or crushed during this process !) From here the beans are completely removed from the pods by hand, cleaned and placed into bags.
The bags are then taken by road (large trucks) to our factory / head office in the big city where they are graded by hand before being transported by road once again, to the coastal town (and port) of Tanga, where they are shipped to Holland.
These beans are all used for / sold as “seed beans” and are not for consumption in this form.
We employ a large number of people from the surrounding villages to help us with the bean harvest each year. This season we have employed 120 people (mostly women but some men aswell) who otherwise have no income as the majority of them are subsistence farmers. Apart from their daily wage, they also get to take as much of the empty bean pods home as they like, for feeding their livestock.
Sometimes at night, we get a few sly people coming and putting a herd of 100 or more cattle through the ready harvested bean fields and they eat all the pulled beans (lying in the fields to dry) or beans that have not yet been removed/packed and leave before sunrise so we can’t catch them. Aside from being costly, this is heartbreaking after all the work, time and care gone in to a field of beans like this. No one has fences around their farms here as they are just too vast. Our farm alone is 3500 acres and part of that runs along and across a public access dirt road, so fencing it is almost impossible !
