Peas are always our first crop that gets harvested. Usually around the middle of June, large pea harvesters pull into the field and start to pick up and de-pod the peas. If you can believe it, these huge harvesters actually operate gentle enough to take the peas right out of the pod while out in the field.
Then they haul the peas in trucks to the cannery where they are washed, blanched, frozen and put into bags, ultimately landing in soups, pre-made food, and in grocery store freezers for you to buy! Our field alone will produce about 160,000 lbs of peas!!
The harvesters showed up very early in the morning. So as we drove into the farm Hoot just about lost his mind seeing those big machines working already! It didn’t take long before he had his papa by the hand and was telling him it was time to head out to the field. Once there he ate his body weight in peas, and had a ball watching harvest! 
Here’s a video that I took so you can see the sheer mass of these harvesters.
The headers are picking up the vines along with the peas, cracking open the pods, removing the peas and then the pod and vine material comes back out the back of the machine. Once the harvester has gone through an area all that is left is a row of “trash”. 
And how does the saying go….one man’s trash is another man’s treasure or something right? So after harvest is over we have one of our neighbors come in and bale the vines and pods off the field. He then uses it for feed for his cows.
So what is next for this field? Since harvest for peas is so early, this year we are going to attempt to double crop this land. After removing the vines and pods, we headed into the field and started to work the ground again. We plan to plant a late planting of green beans.
If you want to see some more photos of our farm and more specifically of pea harvest last year please check out ItsMomSense. Farming in Focus – May. Happy Friday!
NuttyGrass 
Back in the old days they hauled them to the cannery in tanks of water to cushion the ride do they still do that?
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How many lbs of N do the peas put in the soil , when I farmed a heavy crop of Tetraploid alsike clover would give us 60 lbs of N ,it would be a bugger to plow down but the soil would be better than potting soil from a green house,
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That’s a good question Tom, and I don’t know the answer for you. We definitely like the peas for the soil benefits, we are also able trying to crop right afterwards with a round of green beans this year to see how that works.
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