farm market for 'the others, I
arkets a great variety of
ce, with 77 acres set up for
g vegetables and 60 acres
d in fruit trees,
ras while touring the Raab
that the unfortunate wagon
:nt occurred. As a result of
me delay, the tour of the
icrs Canning Company was
(Turn to Page A2l)
ss of cropland, explains
IW.
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& BINS OIM MONTHLY PROGRAM
FOUR COUNTIES
CONTRACTOR
R.D., 80x249
Coalport, Pa. 16627
PH; 814-672-5751
OGO INC.
1 Jerry's Road
set. Md. 21154
301-692-5350
O. A. NEWTON NICKLIN STEEL TRI-STATE MARINE
& SON CO. BUILDERS DIST. INC.
iridgeville, Delaware 19933 301 N. Broad Street Route 256
PH: 302-337-8211 Grove City. Pa. 16127 Deale, Md. 20751
PH; 412-458-7243 PH: 301-867-1447
Vegetable tour
(Continued from Page A2O)
cancelled. However William
Carman, a representative of the
company’s farm department,
spoke briefly on the plant’s
operation.
After lunch at the 4-H center, the
-tour continued with a stop at
Hanover Brands Inc., one of the
largest vegetable processors on
the East Coast. The plant which is
located in the town that bears its
namesake is used basically for
canning vegetables, both in glass
and cans. The company owns three
other plants in Pennsylvania which
are used to process frozen
vegetables.
The final stop on Monday’s tour
was the John Shearer operation
which involves about 7,000 acres of
land, which ranks him as one of the
largest vegetable growers in the
state. Shearer owns about 200
acres; the rest of the land he farms
is rented. He plants 2,200 acres of
wheat, 600 acres of snap beans, 500
acres of soybeans, and 3,000 acres
of field corn, with a smaller
acreage devoted to sweet com,
popcorn, spinach, and others.
Shearer employs hedging
techniques and firm contracts as
tools for marketing his abundant
crops to Hanover Brands. To get
all those acres of vegetables and
grain harvested, Shearer relys on
a number of large pieces of
equipment, including two Steiger
tractors, two six row corn har
vesters and a snap bean harvester.
To insure his crops never run out of
the nutrients they need, he
maintains a bulk fertilizer blen
ding operation right on the farm.
LEASE IT
See Your
Agri Builder
For Details
HASCHEN TRI-COUNTY
AGRICULTURAL AGRI-SYSTEMS
SYSTEMS R.D.#l, Box 55
P.O. Box 505 Swedesboro, NJ 08085
Chestertown. Md. 21620 PH: 609-467-3174
PH; 301-778-5800
raspberries to be marketed at the farm’s roadside stand. The
farm grows a variety of vegetables and fruits.
Only sixty vegetable growers
continued their tour on Tuesday
morning with a stop at Central
Market in downtown York a 93
year old market owned by
stockholders where stands are
rented to merchants.
The growers learned about the
processing of potato chips at their
next stop, ELrGE Potato Chip
Company. This, family owned
company can produce over 8,000
pounds of potato chips per hour.
An acre under glass was
experienced by the visitors when
they toured the double-glass
greenhouse at the Miller Plant
Farm, York. The Millers’ can
accomodate about 25,000 standard
flats of plants in their houses. They
produce a wide variety of
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WEETER CONCRETE
CONSTRUCTION
P.O. Drawer V
Knox. PA 16232
PH; 814-797-5122
WALTER J. KELLER BUILDING QUILL \
CONSTRUCTION SYSTEMS INC. CONSTRUCTION CO.
RDI 80*403J R.D. 1 80x203 P.0.80x6269 ■
Strasburg. Pa. 17579 Lewisburg. PA 17837 Hamsburg.Pa. 17112 I
PH: 717-687-8681 PH: 717-524-0568 PH: 717-545-7527
vegetable and flowering plants,
including melon transplants.
The Miller’s also farm 224 acres
of land, of which 164 are family
owned. They grow a variety of
vegetables including: sweet corn, -
muskmelons, peppers, toipatoes,
cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage.
They use the vegetables in a three
year rotation pattern along with
corn, wheat and hay.
The tour, coordinated through
the combined efforts of Penn
State’s Peter A. Ferretti, John
Smith, and Chairman John Fitz,
provided some innovative ideas in
marketing and raising vegetables,
along with an insight into
processing for vegetable farmers
whose ‘gardens’ range from ■
several to several hundred acres.
RIGGS
ENTERPRISES
Box 98
Boswell, PA 15531
PH. 814-629-5621
litter is no new idea
LANCASTER At a recent
seminar conducted here for broiler
producers throughout Penn
sylvania, the idea of recycling
litter from the broiler house and
converting it into a burnable fuel
was raised and reinforced by
researcher Norman Smith, head of
the agricultural engineering
department for the University of
Maine.
Although this might seem like a
new and somewhat novel con
cep by most broiler producers.
Smith explained “using litter for
heating houses has been around for
a long time.”
Smith cited studies he conducted
in 1976 where the litter was
collected and burned directly in a
wood-chip burner, common in the
New England area. However, he
conceded, this method proved to be
inadequate since the material was
too fine. The wood chip burner was
temporarily substituted and a
gasified-suspension burner took its
place in the studies, only to prove
this method resulted in a “terrible
problem with fly ash.”
Then in 1978, the researchers
took another step in perfecting the
use of broiler Utter as an alternate
fuel and incorporated into the
process a bark dewaterer to make
pellets out of the broiler Utter. This
dewaterer squeezed the Utter with
a force of 3,000 pounds per square
inch, removing part of the 20
pounds of water that exists in each
pound of Utter. The end result was
a material that ranged in moisture
from 20 to 40 percent a much
better consistency for burning in
M&G BUIL0ING&
GRAIN SYSTEM INC
P.O. Box 35
Schuylkill Haven. PA 17972
PH; 1-800-322-9605
Lancaster Farming, Saturday, July 11,1981—A21
Burning broiler
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the wood chip furnace.
According to Smith, this com
pacted, dewatered pellet burned
relatively clean, with only 15
percent more ash than if wood was
burned. Feeding the litter pellets
into the burner at the rate of 60
pounds per hour resulted in a
temperature of 1,700 to 1,800
degrees Farenheit
“We were hopeful," recalled the
researcher. “Pelleting seemed to
be the way to go. It was easy to
meter and easy to burn.”
The work of the University of
Maine researchers had not gone
unnoticed during the first three
years, and in 1979 the Broiler
Federation funded a $25,000 grant
to be used toward the development
of a commercial version of the
pelleter and burner.
The researchers encountered
several stumbling blocks,
however, as they attempted to
scale-up their model. Smith
recalled how things got too hot
temperatures reached 2,400
degrees Fahrenheit and the cast
iron parts in the apparatus
proceeded to soften. To remedy
this situation, he said, the fire box
was resized to fit the boiler size.
This final adaptation was the last
step in the commercially feasible
furnace. Hie total cost of materials
for this furnace and boiler figured
out to about $2,000. Hie pelleter
cost an additional $3,000, however.
Smith noted that several com
mercial broiler producers already
have adapted this experimental
.design into their bouses, and will
be beating with “clean, hot gas”
from recycled litter.-SM
State.