My husband got the idea to plant the upper field in corn so we could save money on cracked corn for the girls (chickens, for those that wasn't sure). Of course I agreed and let him do his things. It grew beautifully, dried nicely, and him and Kali picked it. All this corn and no sheller. Oh crap!!!!!!
I did what any normal person would do, wrapped my fingers all up in band-aids and started shelling the corn. It took Jeremy and I 8 hours to hand shell about 8 bushel of field corn. We ended up with a 50gal trash can full.
Now to crack it. We don't have a corn cracker, now what? Oh yeah, let's use the coffee grinder. Yes, I used the coffee grinder and did a cup at a time. This took forever. Because not only did we grind it but we also sifted it too, to get the find powder out, and then the large pieces that needed to go back through the grinder. We ended up building a frame with a piece of hardware cloth on it to sift after the fine sifting. After a little while we finally got it down to a science that is went so much quicker and in a matter of a few hours we had it all done.
What we learned out of this:
Buy it from the store it saves time and headaches !!!!!
Lol, just kidding. Yes it takes work but we did eventually purchase a corn sheller, and the coffee grinder we used really only took 15 seconds max to grind a cup of corn. The fine powder you get from the initial sifting is perfect for making cornbread and homemade corn tortillas. So nothing really went to waste and in all seriousness it saved money, not really on the cracked corn for the chickens but on the corn flour products you can make instead of buying, so it all evened out in the long run.