Spinach Greens!

This must have been harder than I thought!  I have a bunch of farm novices on my hands!  ;)  Go figure, right?

Congrats to Beth for pretty much nailing it!  :)

Here are some more pictures from the harvest of spinach greens last week:

These pictures were taken from Bill's phone while he drove the tractor, pulling the "buggy".

It takes seven or eight "buggy" loads to fill up a semi, so they have three tractors, each with a buggy, available during harvest.  As you can see from the picture, the spinach cutter harvests the greens and then sends them on a conveyor belt to the buggy.

Full buggy ready to transfer to semi

This is a picture of dumping the spinach into the semi.  Can you see that man's head right where the greens are hitting the semi on the left corner?  That provides a bit of scale for this picture.... that's a LOT of spinach!  This spinach is grown specifically for a regional canning company.  Bill can't remember how long they have sold greens (also including mustard, turnip and collard greens) to this company, but he thinks it could very likely have started before he was born.

So, in order to figure out how many cans of spinach can be made off of one acre of spinach, let's see if we can do the math...

(we're using estimates from this year's yield)
1 acre = 10 tons of spinach
10 tons = 20,000 pounds (according to Bill's noggin)
20,000 lbs = ~320,000 ounces (according to my handy iphone app)
320,000 ounces / 13.5 oz per can = ~23,704 cans

Um... WOW!  That's a LOT of Spinach!  And, to make it even more amazing... times that by 45 acres!!  Ok, brace yourself...

That means Bill's family is producing enough spinach to equal 1,066,680 cans!

Leads me to wonder -- who actually buys canned spinach?  

Ha - I think I'm going to forward this to one of my best friends that is a math teacher at my old high school.  I'm sure she'd appreciate all the numbers!  :)

Please let me know if you have any questions - I'll ask my handy dandy farmer hubby.  I wrote this with his help tonight - I get in over my head quickly when talking "farm" talk!  :)

Hope you've had a great Tuesday!  Little E had a fever all day and was pretty cranky until I realized I wasn't giving him enough medicine to actually do any good.  Bill and Eli had an hour of playtime before bed and he said it was the best play time they have had in a while and that he seemed to be feeling better already.  If you are so inclined, please pray that whatever is ailing him might, um, STOP.  :)  I have a feeling it's the 2nd molar coming in... I hope I'm right!

Love!