Our wheat grass is produced without the use of any herbicides or pesticides. To accomplish this, we require good planning and hard work.
Pests
There are no pests that cause issues for the young wheat grass.
I can also confirm that due to the cut height and cutting process, we do not have insect content in the juice. This is confirmed by the B12 levels which come only from animals and do not exist in plant materials.
Weed Control
Weed control is an issue that needs to be managed. What is common to both the spring and fall crop cycles is massive over-provisioning. What this means is that we plant approximately 4 times as much land as we require for juicing. Some fields or portions of fields will be infiltrated by weeds and be unusable; however, we only require 25% of the planted crop to be perfectly clean.
Additional planted land may be simply plowed under or if it is in fantastic shape, we may allow it to go to seed to provide seed stock for our next planting.
Spring Crop
- We over-provision by using about 4x more land than the juice harvest requires
- Land is typically planted in the month of July
- We mow all of the fields after the first cold snap to remove existing plants
- The winter months kill the root systems of any existing weeds; however, winter wheat has special protective proteins that allow the plants root system to survive
- When spring comes, the wheat roots spring back to life with a giant head start over any possible weed contaminant
- Some fields or portions of fields will be lost to weed infiltration but the vast majority will be perfectly clean
Fall Crop
- We over-provision by using about 4x more land than the juice harvest require
- Field work begins in late spring
- fields are plowed
- fields are disced
- fields are fallowed (left completely empty)
- field are then cultivated (weeded) repeatedly, typically every 2 weeks and again just before planting
- Planting typically happens in late July
- Without competition, the wheat has a major advantage over other plants in the field as and it sprouts and grows, it shades out other plants from growing
- Some fields or portions of fields will be lost to weed infiltration but the vast majority will be perfectly clean
Equipment Used
PLOW
Deeply penetrates below root systems and flips the ground completely upside down. This buries any above ground plant material and exposes the roots causing the plant to dry up and perish.
DISCS
Chops the chunky material exposed by the plow into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces now become a manageable size for the most important piece equipment which is the cultivator (weed puller) and harrow (land finisher).
CULTIVATOR / HARROW
This equipment is used repeatedly before planting. The clover leaf wedges at the bottom of the cultivator snag the weed root systems and leaves then lying on the surface of the ground where they will dry up and perish. The rolling harrow behind the cultivator chops both weeds and chunks of soil finely to smooth the surface of the land.
