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Show fiain If aking Doesn't Interest Farmer Who Sprinkles 1800 Acres ELSA, TEX. Making rain by seeding clouds with dry ice doesn't interest W. A. Harding, owner ofjhe unique Evergreen Farms. For the past 11 years "he's been making two and a half inches in-ches of rainfall a day. Harding docs his rainmaking on his 1,800 acre farm, where he grows alfalfa al-falfa and sudan grasses for dehydration de-hydration and manufacture into chicken and horse feed and vitamin vita-min pills for humans. His is the only farm in the world, Harding believes, that operates op-erates full-blast 24-hours a day, seven days a week, year after year. Continual sprinkling, harvesting harvest-ing and dehydration is going on 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 120-acre block. The next day another 120 acres are showered. ' By providing plenty of rain, Harding is able to cut his alfalfa 10 times a year, his oats and other oth-er 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; Har-ding; one of the real estate men who "opened up"- the Lower Rio Grande Valley after World War I. The alfalfa and oats are conveyed con-veyed into trucks and hauled to the dehydrator, where they are fed into a telescopic drum furnace fur-nace 24 feet in diameter. Temperatures of 1,750 degrees Fahrenheit bake out the moisture. mois-ture. Then a hammer mill, grinding grind-ing at 3,600 revolutions per minute, min-ute, chops the stalks before they're sucked thru a fine screen. The finished product is a pastel pas-tel green flour, as fine as a housewife's 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. con-sumption. "TJie best thing-. about this farm is that we contract for our production a year in advance," explained Harding, who last year turned out 8,000 tons of dehydrated dehy-drated cereal grasses and alfalfa. "Our soil 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 dehydration plant. |
