| Show texas rainmaker Rain maker sprinkles crops cro s 24 hours daily dail y ELSA TEX making rain by seeding clouds with dry tee ice interest W A harding owner of 0 the unique evergreen farms for 11 years hes been making two and a half hal inches of rainfall a day harding does his rainmaking rain making on his 1800 acre tarm farm where he grows alfalfa and sudan grasses for dehydration and manufacture into chicken and horse feed and vitamin pills for humans his Is the only tarm farm in the world harding believes that operates full blast 24 hours a day seven days a week year alter after year continual sprinkling harvesting and dehydration Is going oh at the T shaped farm in the lower rio grande valley every 24 hours the sprinkling system lays down two and a half inches of rain on a acre block the next day another acres are showered cuts alfalfa frequently by providing plenty of at rain harding Is able to cut his alfalfa 10 times a year his oats and other small grains three or four times his oats are cut when eight inches tall alfalfa at 16 inches the harvesters barely clear the soil as they snip off the plants we cut while the plants are tender and have their greenest protein content explained harding one of the real estate men who opened up the lower rio grande valley after world war 1 I the alfalfa and oats are conveyed into trucks and hauled to the dehydrator where they are fed into a telescopic drum furnace 24 feet in diameter temperatures of 1750 degrees fahrenheit bake out the moisture then a hammer mill grinding at revolutions per minute chops the stalks before sucked through a fine screen produces green flour the finished product Is a pastel green flour as fine as a house cifes baking flour the entire dehydration and grinding process takes less than three minutes most of the sacks of green flour are shipped to kansas city where they are mixed either with poultry feed or processed into vitamin pills for human consumption the best thing about this farm Is that we contract for our production a year in advance explained harding who last year turned out tons of dehydrated cereal grasses and alfalfa our soft is getting richer too because of the alfalfa although we fertilize the oats and sudan grasses the farm has its own power supply gas wells provide power for the water pumps in the sprinkling system and for heat for the th dehydration plant |
