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Anyone have experience growing/selling buckwheat?

I

IA Leo

Member
My family tree has celiac proclivity (gluten intolerance). I grew up near Limesprings, Iowa near a mill that ground a lot of buckwheat around the civil war times. Now I find out that buckwheat does not have gluten. I have been reading up on internet advice on buckwheat growing, sounds tricky and not much room for profit.
Sounds like a b&@#$% to harvest. Anyone here ever done it?
Leo
 
I remember it being grown as a last ditch effort to get a crop because of flooding, hail or other disasters. It is a very short season crop.
Not sure what kind of demand there is.
 
Tried to follow winter wheat with it once. I had a market for it for deer food plot seed, but never got enough of a crop to combine. Maybe I just picked the driest year in ten to try it.
 
Can't get seed locally. By the way, Buckwheat makes great pancakes, but probably best if flour is diluted with regular pancake mix... Full strength is pretty strong. Farmers used to grow it around here as a cover crop, and plow it under as green manure.
 
Buckwheat is a cool climate crop. Kingwood WV is up in the high mountains and is the home of the annual Buckwheat Festival. We have family get our stone ground buckwheat flour from Hazelton Milling near Kingwood, but I believe they will ship it if you call them.
In Russia they steam the kernals and eat it like rice.
 
Try growing teff or millet. Both are a lot easier to grow and harvest. Buckwheat has to be hulled for use. Teff doesn't yield a lot but is short season and doesn't take much fertilizer. Millet has to be swathed and then harvested out of the swath. Both are gluten free.
 
Buckwheat and canola are about the same size and are a b@#$ to harvest. Basicly the combine has to be water tight and you have to travel about walking speed.
Never tried buckwheat did try canola grew fine harvest was bad and an old combine made the yield small.
 
It grows easy but harvest is hard and it must be hulled.Cheaper to buy what you need already ground for family use.
 
Some years ago a place around here was getting set up to contract to by it but at that time was not able to do. What they said at that time is the wheat straw makes a poison to the buckweat. If you do try to follow wheat then you have to remove all straw residue, clip as short as possible and bale off all straw and then moldboard plow to turn under all remaining remenates of the wheat straw. That was not an option for me so did no more investigating. Second option was to burn the wheat field. Following oats was what they said you needed to do. Was told that the seed was a lot larger than you are saying but the old AC 60 combine would have handled it with no problem and they were the best small grass seed combine ever made and would handle seed as small as a grain of sugar.
 
Leo, I have grown buckwheat the past several years. I am in south central Iowa. I disk up what I want to seed and apply the seed with the old endgate seeder. I plant it the second week in July. We seed it for late honey production
so we are not interested in the crop. I will tell you this, if you have an infestation of wild turkeys in your area, the minute the crop is ripe, they will move in and eat every seed they can find. I get the seed from the local farmers coop. It is not expensive.
 
I use it in my Deer food plot. Deer love it. Also it is allopathic. It kills Quack grass and other weeds.I get seed at local farm supply.
 
My grandfather grew some buckwheat years ago.It can be tricky to harvest . There are a couple places in NY that contract for buckwheat. Go to BirkettMills dot com and you will get some info as well as links to Cornell University for more buckwheat info.
 
Have grown it many times, but there are some tough parts. Sets seed from the top down, so by the time bottom seed is ripe, top seed has dropped off. That is the common variety. there is a variety that sets seed all at once but it is tightly controlled by contract. Because of the variable seed, harvested product will have some overripe and some immature and for goodness sakes, if you do nothing else, keep an eye on it in storage. It can go into storage showing 15 ona meter and two weeks later overnight it will be steaming and stinking and useless. That may happen anytime through storage period. Yield very variable from year to year. A great use as mentioned is weed control.
 
I grow it for flour and bee food. Buckwheat has great food value. It has something init that causes skin to be sun sensitive. Pigs will get the itch if feed toomuch. People burn their ears easy too. The one thing you have watch is the volunteer buckwheat the next year. I swath mine and use a MF300 combine.
Good luck. Chas.
 
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