It took me a while to decide which community to put this post. Aside this community, I thought of the Daily Blog Community (since this is kind of a daily blog) and Weekend Experience community (because it’s a weekend activity). But I decided that since the main focus of the post is a self-sufficient agricultural activity, it belongs here. So here I am.
Weekends are supposed to be rest days after a busy week. For my family, weekends are not always rest days. This rule or concept breaks in the farming season. Not that they’re people that don’t like rest or don’t enjoy the weekend, but because the weekend is when there’s a lot of people available to help with farm activities. Farmers that have very large farms need as much help as they can get, and they get it during weekend when there’s no school activity.
This past weekend happened to be one of those busy weekends for us. We were on the farm harvesting my dad’s soya beans yesterday and today. Well to be fair, we did harvesting on Saturday and Processing and Collecting on Sunday.
Saturday(Collecting Soya Beans to one spot)
On Saturday, there wasn’t much to do because my dad already hired laborers to uproot the soya beans and heap them into small bundles through out the farm.
My siblings and I went ahead of everybody else to clear the area where we’ll collect all the small soya beans heap into one big heap.
Then my dad and laborers arrived a bit later with my younger siblings and some laborers. My young siblings would cry if my dad didn’t allow them come, so he brought them. I remember being like them a couple years back. Now I’m going against my will lol.
So the kids went through the farm picking small bundles of soya beans and gathering them on the area we cleared earlier. They used mosquito nets and sacks to do that. They moved in pairs, with each person holding one end of the sack or mosquito net. They would load the soya bundle into the mosquito net, tie up, and head for the collecting area. But the laborers were energetic enough to carry a small heap by themselves.
All kinds of dangerous animals could lie under the soya beans bundles, so we gave the kids sticks to raise and check under the heaps before they pick them up. We killed a snake during last year’s harvest so this was a safety precaution of a sort. You can see what the final heap looked like here.
Sunday- The Real Deal: Processing
So this is where the real work is. My brothers and I didn’t do that much work the other day because the work wasn’t hectic and we had laborers too. But Sunday was different because there was a lot to do that required all hands on deck.
You see, the processing of soya beans is done by the corn sheller machine machine. The machine is used for a variety of other stuff aside corn shelling. So we basically fed the big heap we made the previous day into the corn shelling machine and it “ate it up”, spat out the sticks and unwanted stuff(chaff) through one end of the machine, and soya beans at another end. It sounds so simple, but is actually a bit complex. We divided ourselves into 5 groups to handle this.
Catalyst group
The catalyst group basically made things easier for another group I’ll explain in a bit. They cut small bundles from the big heap and being them closer to the corn sheller machine for the next group.
Feeders
This group take the small bundles the catalyst group cut out, and feed them into the corn sheller machine.
Corn Sheller Operators
This was a two-man team standing on top of the corn sheller machine that took the small heaps from the feeders and fed it to the corn sheller. They had sticks with which they pushed the soya beans into the corn sheller’s grinder.
Collectors and cleaners
Like I mentioned already, the corn sheller grinds and spits out soya beans at one end. Well the collectors have basins under where the soya beans come out from to collect the beans.
The soya beans from the corn seller machine doesn’t come out clean, but with small sticks and maybe stones from the ground that made it into the machine with the heap.
So it is the cleaners job to remove those sticks and stones. How do they do that? Well for large sticks, they just handpick them, but for the smaller stick the get rid of then through winnowing.
Packagers
After the soya beans has been cleaned, it heads for the packaging unit. They’re responsible for packaging the processed soya into sacks, and sowing the sacks close.
After all the struggle and wahala, I met up with my boys for a movie night later in the night when we got home to relax. I’ve been away for a long time, and thought it’d be a good idea to hang out with them tonight. We watched “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs And Shaw”. Didn’t really pay much attention to the movie though because we were chatting the entire time. Maybe I should make a post about that in the weekend experience community.
I also got two nice shots which I’ll be sharing with others in a later Nature Gemz album collection. I think you’ll like them I would’ve gotten more, but my dad doesn’t like you being on the your phone when we have a lot of work to do on the farm.
All pictures in this post were taken using my iPhone 11 Pro Max.
Who Authored This Post?
I am 
