Swathing is the way to go! A friend of mine direct cut his buckwheat with a JD 6620 and it was a nightmare (a lot of plugging)! I was lucky enough to pick up an old JD700 swather (I call it my NASCAR swather, it only turns left) and the Sund pickup on my K2 worked really well. I let it dry for 11 days and it was down to about 17% moisture (next year 2 weeks),the direct cut was over 24%. One problem with buckwheat is that it is a fairly high volume_low weight seed and with too much air you can blow a lot of it out over the chafer. I managed to get a really clean sample but my losses were too high, so I backed the air down to almost 0 and wound up with some stems, but did cut down on the loss. Swathing works well with buckwheat because it is an indeterminate crop that stays green even after the vast majority (75-80%) of the seeds are ripe so you will always be fighting tough green stems and leaves with direct cutting. The other problem is that the seed will reabsorb the water from the green stems and you can wind up with problems of the grain heating and spoiling in a few days (you can also run into some real handling problems). The stems in the swathed buckwheat are dry and are cleaned out on delivery to the mill, and a little dockage is better than harvesting loss. Good luck next year.