Always tweaking and fiddling around! Gotta keep life interesting, right?

Good eye. I did have that cup elevator oversped by a fair margin. Its capacity was definitely the bottleneck on that machine, so I wanted it running as quick as possible without throwing corn everywhere. It worked fairly well for a whole winter, and then ultimately we upgraded to a more modern machine with a bagging auger.

Now that's interesting! The Super 7s are big machines. I'd love to see one in action! After using this Hero fanning mill all last winter, we upgraded in the spring of '21 to a Clipper M2B - the later all metal version with the bagging auger. So far this year I've run about 400 bags of oats through it and over 300 bags of corn. It was an amazing upgrade, and with Dad and I both working we can fill a bag a minute. I'll have to try the pant-leg trick!

@@ravenviewfarm The M2B is a great machine. We don’t bag directly out of the screen machine 🙂. We do clean all our grain 👍🏻

You're not the first to ask that question. I clean it so that the product is consistent, and because it's actually faster to put it through the cleaner with the bagging auger than it would be to fill bags right out of a gravity box. We upgraded to a better fanning mill last year, so we can really make good time with it. The machine can fill bags faster than I can handle them. If I didn't clean the corn, some of the bags would be pristine, and others would be full of cob chunks and stalk pieces and dust. A few of my customers put the corn in automatic feeders that don't function well if the corn is dirty, and some folks run it in corn stoves - which can tolerate a little bit of debris, but not much. I've got some past entrepreneurial experience, and I can tell you that customers want a consistent product. Doesn't matter what you're selling, it has to be the same all the time. Otherwise you'll hear about it. So I don't sell bags of dirty corn, simple as that.

If you ask a premium price, you need to offer a uniform premium product 🙂

You bring up a good point, so I'm going to start by saying that I absolutely agree with you. If we're talking strictly efficiency, then not cleaning it at all would save a whole step. Here's why I choose to run it through the cleaner: Before I started selling wildlife feed, I did some market research. I talked to some folks who I knew bought bags of feed regularly. I haunted some online forums where hunters and conservationists hang out. I tried to find articles or blog posts by other farmers who were doing this, etc. The biggest complaint I found from the consumer side was that they went to the store and bought a bag of corn, and when they dumped it out it was dirty. For most of them, it wasn't that they felt the deer or squirrels would be shocked and chagrined by the foreign material, but that they paid a premium price for something and then discovered that some part of it was junk, so it felt like they got even less useful product than they anticipated. It's not actually all that big of a problem, but it's the perception of the customer. So I vowed that if I was going to sell wildlife corn, it had better be good and clean so that people felt they were getting what they paid for. Also, some folks use feeders with automatic mechanisms that dump some corn out every so often, and if the corn is dirty or has cob material in it, it can plug up these mechanisms. Same goes for people with corn stoves. They can handle some grit and cob pieces, but not a lot. So my goal was to be able to offer a product that works for everyone - from the people who really don't care, to the ones that need really clean corn or would complain if it wasn't. Just keep it simple with one product that suits a lot of different customers. So far it's worked out pretty well. Spoiler alert: Later on we upgraded to an even better fanning mill, and now we can clean and fill bags at an incredible pace. I think it's actually faster to run it through the cleaner than it would be to try to fill it right out of the wagon.

@@ravenviewfarm Thanks!