Because I can. Also, because I grow them for seed to sell.

Yes I assume you can grow for seeds to sell. I figure that is farm seed market, not consumer market...

"most of the heirloom beans can still be purchased online"

Actually, only a tiny percentage of the vast variety of beans is available for purchase online. For instance, I've never seen Violet's Multicolored Butterbeans sold online. Have you ever grown them? I'll never forget the first time I stood in the garden and shelled a pod, and then another. How extraordinarily beautiful the beans are! Each one is a masterpiece of different colors. They remind me of periwinkle shells on the beach. I laughed with delight as I picked the pods and shelled them right there in the garden. Each bean was more beautiful than the last. I ran right up to the house and got my little boy so he could marvel at them too.

I want to feel that sense of wonder and joy every year till I'm too old to go into the garden. Then I'll hand down my seeds to my great-grandchild and he (or she) will grow them and bring them to my bedside so we can admire them together.

Maybe next year I'll discover an even more amazing bean. Wouldn't that be something?! And that's why I grow beans.

(Also because 10 pounds of Good Mother Stallard from Rancho Gordo is $60 plus shipping. I can grow them a heck of a lot cheaper.)

How many plants do you need to grow to produce 1 pound of dry Good Mother Stallard beans? Then I can assess as to how much room (linear feet) do we need to produce 10 lbs of the beans.

Just wonder...

A row 100 ft long will usually produce about a gallon of seed that weighs about 7 pounds. Give excellent growing conditions and the yield can easily double.

Get it. This makes sense for very rare heirloom beans, but not for the common beans we can buy from store. Maybe fresh produce, like snap beans and cucumbers make more economic sense than growing dry shelled beans.

Of course, if you value the beans at $20+ a pound, than it is a different story....

Yes, it is important to have fun grow the beans. I'll need to experiment more with shelly beans. I have about 75' linear trellis area to plant and I need to better use this area, not just to get a few pounds of beans. So have to pick the best varieties to plant....

75' of pole beans will yield a lot more than a few pounds.

"75' of pole beans will yield a lot more than a few pounds."

I agree... and as Fusion has already stated, sometimes much more. The dry seed harvest for one of my pole beans this year is 3 pounds thus far, from 15 feet of row... and that is actually a little lower than I would expect for a pole bean. Healthy plants (spaced 12" apart) can easily yield 6-8 ounces per plant, and some varieties will do better than that.

Probably the best reason for growing your own beans is that commercially grown beans are routinely sprayed with Roundup at harvest. Roundup was recently classified as carcinogenic in California, and there is a lot of information coming out that it annihilates gut flora in humans. Spraying beans (and grains) with Roundup at harvest time is a "recommended practice" for large scale farms. It saves time/money because it insures that the bean plants all die down evenly, which makes harvesting the crop faster and easier. It's called preharvest staging.

Here's a Monsanto brochure which explains the benefits of dousing your beans with Roundup just before harvesting. Monsanto's Preharvest Staging Guide

Happydog, it's no wonder there's so many people getting cancer in recent years. You think you're eating healthy but you're not. I myself had a go around with it in 2013, if it wasn't for my GP fighting tooth and nail for me I wouldn't be here today. Monsanto has become a dirty word in my neck of the woods.

Annette

I'm not sure if this is common practice. We live in a rural town and there is a lot of corn and soybean fields. We live near a 120 acres of farm field. The farmers just come each spring to sow the seeds, then wait until fall to harvest the dry crop. They never water or spray the crops.

It's not very cost effective for me because I have a relatively small area to plant. If I had a hundred feet to plant them, that would be different. I donate much of my space to tomatoes and peppers, because the grocery store ones taste gross and they grow very well here. I only have room for maybe 5 feet of bean plants, and get less than 1 pound out of it. It's just more efficient for me to plant beans to harvest early, especially the long beans that grow to 12-18 inches per bean. I got probably 3-4 pounds of green beans this year from 2 plants, where I would have been lucky to get a 1/2 pound from bush shell beans. I do like the scarlet runner beans, though, which you can harvest at any stage, including the blossoms.

Buy the common ones in bulk from the store and grow the special, uncommon ones for trading.

The big seed companies (of which there are fewer and fewer, and will probably just end up with Monsanto owning everything) only sell what is popular and grows everywhere. Using that criteria alone, we will lose more and more great varieties simply because their poularity is not widespread. With fewer varieties, we lose diversity, which is important to maintain food crops over the centuries.

The GMO crops that Monsanto & Friends are forcing on us are identical as to type. Sooner or later, we will have some disease that will hit them and wipe them out. The people who have varieties that are not susceptible to the disease will be all that saves people.

[Read about the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1800s: in Ireland alone, a million people died from the effects of starvation, and another million left the country. They lost approx. 20-25% of their population, just because they were so dependent upon potatoes, they mostly used one variety, and a disease was imported from America.]

"Between snap and dry shell is the green shell/shelly stage, which is very tasty and very hard to find at the market, so that's an additional reason. Dry bean types are all suitable for shellies (some better than others)."

Thats the reason I grow them.. The dry beans are just a byproduct..

"The GMO crops that Monsanto & Friends are forcing on us are identical as to type. Sooner or later, we will have some disease that will hit them and wipe them out. The people who have varieties that are not susceptible to the disease will be all that saves people."

Good point...