If you see someone pulling a hand wagon in downtown Detroit’s financial district, it might be Kevin Messing of Sheridan Acres Farm. The wagon provides him with an easy way to navigate the busy city streets as he delivers heirloom dry beans to the city’s restaurateurs.
Messing is a fourth-generation bean grower from Ubly, MI, part of the state’s “thumb.” The region is about two hours north of Detroit and in the heart of Michigan’s bean country.
Sheridan Acres is part of a larger farm operation that Messing’s parents, sister and brother-in-law operate.
“Our farm as a whole is a diversified cash crop and dairy farm. We farm about 120 acres of alfalfa in any given year, 200 acres of corn about 160 acres of dry beans and then we have about 10 acres of heirloom beans,” Messing said.
They also grow soft white wheat which is sold locally and ends up in products like Triscuits, shredded wheat cereals and Goldfish crackers. His sister and brother-in-law robotically milk about 250 Holsteins.
As a self-proclaimed bean grower and bean lover at heart, Messing’s interest was piqued in 2015 when he stopped at a farm market on the back side of Mt. Hood and saw Orca beans for the first time. Orca (also known as calypso) beans are an heirloom dry bean with striking contrasts of black and white markings – like the cetaceans they take their name from.
Messing started buying packets of different heirloom varieties and rented a half-acre from his father, planting with the same tractor and planter used by his great-grandfather.
“When fall came around, we pulled them by hand. We borrowed a pull-type combine from a neighbor to get them threshed and ended up with a truck bed full of beans,” Messing said.
He turned to the internet and started researching farm-to-table restaurants in Detroit. Fortunately, there wasn’t a local dry bean supplier, and Messing was able to sell the beans.
In planning for year two, he knew hand pulling and feeding the beans manually through the combine was unsustainable. He started searching for used equipment. Because he’s in the Wolverine State’s bean country, there was plenty of field equipment for his scale of growing.
“With the advent of direct harvest, the old two-step harvest equipment and a lot of cultivators and things became readily available,” he said. (Direct harvest is the process in which beans are harvested by a single-pass combine. Two-step requires undercutting and windrowing the plants and then combining them after they have dried.)
Over the next few years, Messing increased to about 10 acres of dry beans. He plants 12 varieties on 30-inch rows with an International 800 plate planter. He likes the plate planter because it allows him to seed small quantities of beans as opposed to air or vacuum planters, which he said have a difficult time completely planting out.
Kevin Messing plants 12 heritage bean varieties on 30-inch rows, which he then sells to restaurants in the Detroit area. Photo courtesy of Kevin Messing
A pre-emergent herbicide is used at planting time, but the remaining weed control is mechanical with two cultivators – an Alloway and a Hiniker. Messing cultivates two or three times depending on weather conditions and how long it takes the beans’ canopies to develop.
At harvest time, he mows the beans with a Pickett one-step rod cutter. The machine pulls and windrows the beans in a single pass. Messing then picks up one row of beans at a time with a Lilliston combine.
“These are easy machines to open up and clean out in between, so even growing 10 different bean varieties, it’s not too bad,” he said. It takes him only about 15 minutes to clean out the combine between varieties with very little cross contamination.
Sheridan Acres’ pinch point is in cleaning the beans, and it has been difficult to find affordable equipment at the right scale. Messing started with a wooden Clipper 2B cleaner, but this had its limitations; it only removed the small debris and blew out the light materials. The beans then needed to be hand sorted in order to ensure a quality product free of split beans, rocks and other dirt.
For cleaning, he now uses a metal Clipper 2B fanning mill which saves him 10% to 15% in time compared to the wooden mill; he still needs to hand sort.
Messing said, “At the end of the day, they’re essentially the same machine, but the newer one does it more efficiently.”
His goal is to eventually have two fanning mills in operation – one to scalp and take out the dirt and the other to sort out the split beans. (He has a tempeh customer who can utilize splits.)
After six years of growing beans, he’s also finally located some appropriately-scaled used equipment: a Forsberg AS destoner, Forsberg 6B and 10M gravity tables and a Crippen J18 polisher. He’s working on rebuilding the equipment, but it’s still a work in progress. With this equipment, he expects he’ll be able to clean about 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of beans per hour, which exceeds his needs at this point but allows room for expansion should he increase acreage.
Currently, the majority of the dry beans are still sold to chefs in the Detroit area. Messing deliberately chose restaurants in the beginning because he and his wife have off-farm jobs and two young children and didn’t want the time commitment farmers markets require. It’s been a hustle to sell the increased quantities of beans, requiring many cold calls, slowly building relationships and dropping off samples at restaurants. During COVID, he also set up a simple e-commerce site and now sells about 20% of the crop to online customers.
Messing’s goal is to sell an entire year’s crop within a year of harvest. According to him, dry beans change in moisture content over time and therefore take longer to cook. Their colors also tend to darken over time.
“A bean, right at harvest time, they have the best, brightest color that cooks so fast. My goal was to deliver that to as many people as possible,” he said.
He’s also just really happy to carry on Michigan’s and his family’s bean growing traditions. “I love all beans. I eat all beans,” he said. “But the variety in the heirloom beans makes it a lot of fun.”
by Sonja Heyck-Merlin
