What can you tell me about growing your own wheat?

[Oldcountryboy]

How much would I need to plant to feed a family of 5 per year? How much room would I need to grow that amount?

[ericjeeper]

ALL depends on how much wheat you use a year.

[kwagner21]

i thought that was winter wheat you plant in the fall. then there is spring wheat. but i don't really know either. waiting to see what others say...

[whinnyninny]

Here's a webpage about a guy who tried out a little experiment growing his own wheat:

http://waltonfeed.com/old/wheat.html


And a quick Google search brought up this page (from the UK)... quote from the article, "It's a lot of bother for very little return." :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7284011.stm

I bought a 2nd-hand book a couple years ago called Small-Scale Grain Raising, but it's out of print now and quite pricey. It was only $20 when I bought it... maybe the current wheat "crisis" is encouraging a lot more people to try growing their own.

[wy_white_wolf]

http://waltonfeed.com/old/wheat.html

I know MEN also has a write up on wheat if you want to search there archives.

[Andy]

Gene Logsdon's book Small Scale Grain Raising is very helpful for the home grower. It's available online:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0.../030210toc.htm


Good luck!

Andy

[diane]

Thanks for the link Andy. I love that book!! I learned so much from it and tryed so much of what he had to say over the years.

[puddlejumper007]

can someone advise me about this..it is a solar heat panel you can build yourself , will you please look it up at movilehomerepair.com and let me know what you thank
pat

[puddlejumper007]

ok i give up i posted it in wrong thread and do not how to change it aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[SquashNut]

we decieded that it would be easier to grow dent corn for grinding. It could be planted and harvested by by hand if need be.

[Old Vet]

The first thing you need to do is find how much you need for a year. The ssecond thing you need to do is to is have a soil samle. The third thing is to decide if you are going to feritile the crop and how (chemical or manure). Then all you need to do is plaint about what you need and hope for the best.

I used to grow wheat and the crop is not just plaint and hope for the best. You will have anywhere from 10 to 40 bushels for the crop if you care for it with the best you can. What are you going to do to gather the heads and get the grain out of the heads? I used to use a combine but they are verry expencive. I ususly plain about a bushel to the acre and had a good crop. This was seed wheat so for field wheat that was cathered and usedfor seed you may need to plaint 1and1/4 per acre.

[stranger]

figure on at least 50-80 bushles per acre if you soil is any good at all, youi'll have plenty for your self and to make a deal with a person with a combine to harvest it.
facts.
It takes nine seconds for a combine to harvest enough wheat to make about 70 loaves of bread.

An acre will produce enough wheat for about 2,500 loaves of wheat bread.

Bread is probably the one food eaten by people of every race, culture and religion.

One family of four can live 10 years off the bread produced by one acre of wheat.

When shopping for 100 percent whole wheat bread, look for a label that has the words “whole wheat.”

[DaleK]

Depends where you are. Some areas can grow winter wheat well, some can't. Some can grow spring wheat well, some can't grow it at all. We mostly grow soft red winter wheat (about 270 acres this year), sometimes a little soft white winter wheat. We're in a pretty good winter wheat area so we can usually get 60-70 bushels, sometimes 90-100 in a good year. Some areas 30 bushels of wheat is considered a good crop. We plant 100-130 lbs of seed per acre depending on the soil. We put 6 gallons of liquid starter on in the fall when we plant, and urea in the spring depending on soil tests. Try a 10x10 plot first and see if you can handle harvesting it by hand, you might want to get it combined eventually but it's hard to find somebody that will bother coming to combine an acre or two.

[Windy in Kansas]

This older chart shows the average wheat yields for all of Kansas which is typically the number one producing wheat state in the United States. http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/wheatpage/Links/yields.html The chart would be for hard red winter wheat. In just the last few years has Kansas started growing spring wheat with hard white being the most desirable.

You may wish to search the gardening pages as there was some information on small plot growing there a while back.

The problem isn't with the growing, it is with the tedious, labor intensive harvesting and threshing. Also with getting a milling and baking variety with the proper gluten, taste, and protein content. Frequently blends are used to achieve those goals by flour mills.

Poor crops in some areas of the US may leave seed wheat hard to come by.

[farminghandyman]

say 2 bushels per person or 120 pounds of wheat, for an adult, so x 5 would be 10 bushels of wheat a year, or 600 pounds, (now your mileage my vary),

U.S. per capita food use appears to have peaked. Until recently, U.S. wheat producers could count on rising per capita food use of wheat flour to expand domestic demand for their crop. The strength of this domestic market developed out of the historic turnaround in U.S. per capita wheat consumption in the 1970s. U.S. per capita wheat consumption declined for nearly 100 years as caloric requirements decreased, because physical labor became less common and diets diversified. Wheat consumption dropped from over 225 pounds per person in 1879 to a low of 110 pounds in 1972. http://151.121.68.30/Briefing/Wheat/2005baseline.htm

in our area yields on a good year is about 30 and on the pour side 10 on the low side and of course there are those years where you may have more or less,


I would say go for about 2/3 of an acre, to an acre if you have extra store or sell it,

There are 43,560 square feet in an acre.

If the land is a perfect square, it is 208.71 feet wide by 208.71 feet long.

If the land is rectangular in shape, you would have to know at least the length of one dimension in order to figure the other.

[Quint]

I've always just hauled it to the elevator but I'm grabbing a few plastic buckets of it this year. I'm going to use some and stash some more in long term storage.

I think I've got 20 acres or so planted this year just for kicks.