THANK YOU Melissa for your response. I would be what you would call “all over the place”. A real novice here. 
A friend who gave me my starter and who helped me with loaf #5 said EXACTLY that - change only one thing :\ I am going to try to abide by that.
Just to illustrate how all over the place I was: Loaf #1 was America’s Test Kitchen “Almost No-Knead Sourdough Bread”. It calls for 3 2/3 c All Purpose Flour. No Whole Wheat. Maybe that’s why it worked! Loaf #2 was a King Arthur recipe found here: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/learn/guides/sourdough/bake and while following this I was confused with some of the instructions so I continued reading up on sourdough bread baking on the internet and was quite skeptical of the % starter specified in the recipe. 454g starter for 687g of flour (of which 85g was supposed to be King Arthur Premium whole wheat flour). The proportion of starter is 66%. This recipe is what got me started on the path of using my own Emmer Farro whole wheat. To me whole wheat was any whole wheat. (Sorry). Loaf #3 was so bad I think I blocked out which recipe I used and it probably is for the best as I’m sure the failure is not because of the recipe. Similarly Loaf #4 was an attempt to recover from #3 and I think I was using the same recipe as #3. Loaves #5, 6 and 7 are all my friend’s recipe. By now I have read up on Baker’s percentages etc. etc. and am pretty much following the recipe except that i kept increasing the proportion of whole wheat and decreasing the bread flour and pretty much staying with 73% hydration. What I found when i increased the Emmer Farro to 20+% is that during bulk fermentation, the dough progressively got wetter and stickier. It seemed to be very actively fermenting. I was waiting for 1 hour between stretch and folds. For all loaves I carried out Bulk Fermentation to 5 or 6 hours. That is because I really did not know how to tell when to stop. And as it got stickier, I thought I need to keep going. So in the end, I think you are right, I am doing too much bulk fermentation.
As for too long an autolyse, the recipe I am following called for 1 hour. But of course the original recipe is 800g bread flour, 100g rye, and 100g whole wheat. While I had 600g bread flour and 400g Emmer Farro.
Please advise on what I should change in terms of autolyse and bulk fermentation. I will stick with 40% Emmer for now.
I have since found a Whole Emmer Sourdough Bread recipe on this site (breadtopia). I am excited to try that also.
The Vitamix is just convenient. I am not sure it is the best whole wheat grinder. I have not mastered the technique for getting a consistent ground flour. At times I would have 99% ground flour where when I sift it through a sifter there is barely anything left on the sifter. And then at other times, there will be quite a lot of unground whole wheat/bran.
I attached a pic of my Loaf #7 with 40% Emmer F. It was hard to work with but I am more than happy with the result.
