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| Just wandering if anyone has tried to grow all of their own animal feed? I have been reading the listing on here about the hand Sythe, and have been interested for a long time. I have been considering trying to grow my own grains for hogs, and chickens to start with. Just wanting feed back from others.
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I try, but its pretty tough getting the balancing act just right. If you are willing to buy a mineral mix, you would be close enough to have healthy animals, and then feed a good ration from the feed you raise on the farm. If you are okay with that, then its pretty easy to do. I feed a ration of haylage and corn silage, all of which are raised on the farm. This is a good ratio of energy to protein and the sheep do well here without the need for purchased grain. (I do supplement with a custom mineral mix however like salt, selenium, vitamin A, sulfur, etc)
If you are thinking of other grains like wheat, rye or oats, things start getting a lot more problematic. The biggest issue is yield. Corn is a bit easier to pencil out because an acre gives you 20-25 tons to the acre...50% of which is kernels. I don't know the tonnage per acre for oats, rye or wheat, but because its shorter, its going to be a lot less. This means you would need more acres of land in that crop to get enough to get by for the winter.
But this causes another issue. When threshing by hand, you have to do so at the right time otherwise the crop will fall off the stem if its in its prime. Typically with old school harvesting, you do it just before it matures so that you don't lose the grains as the stems fall to the ground from the hand scythe. Everything is fine if you have the time and low acreage amounts to get it done, but if you are working a side job, it might be hard to get in 5 acres when you need to get it in.
Again, I can make everything work pretty well with corn grown on the farm for my sheep, but other grains I was never able to make it work. With arable land so valuable, and a bag of grain pretty cheap, for most homesteaders, hobby farmers and commercial farmers alike, its better to grow grass and let more animals graze and get thier numbers up. In that way, you can raise one or two extra animals, and sell them to your friends and take the money and buy the grain or hay you need versus growing it yourself. There is a lot of money involved in growing crops; sowing and reaping costs a lot of money and then there is the property tax paid on that piece of land. It all adds up.
I have thought about this a lot, and I think the key is to limit your winter feed days. For me its very tough because I live in Maine where winter feeding can be 160-170 days a year! But if I can find a way to winter graze a little deeper into the winter that would reduce the overall tonnage needed on the farm. You are in a better position then me since you are in less severe winters, but my suggestion is to read up all you can on winter grazing, push that to the absolute maximum, and then being able to meet your feed needs via your own farm, would be a lot more manageable.
Everything I said so far is based on my small scale sheep farm, but surprisingly the big dairy farm does the same thing. They bought a special processing head for the chopper to get more nutrition from the kernels of corn. By cracking the corn, their grain bill is vastly reduced. They are not 100% farm-grown feeding, but they are close and that helps the bottom line.
You are thinking exactly as you should, its just the holy grail of livestock ownership. So to restate, I think you need to first get a decent winter grazing operation going. I hope this makes sense for you.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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| Good info Drawbar, how much grain are you storing on your farm at any given time, and how are you storing it? I agree with what you are saying about trying to extend your grazing season as far into winter as possible. Do you give some grain to your sheep year around, or try and limit it to winter? I do think that I will try my hand at wheat and possibly oats. I will start off in a small scale, with just and hand cutting.
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The one thing the southern farmers can do that I cannot, is use some of the winter varieties. I am not sure how easy it would be to do, but I think the TN Cooperative Extension is working on using traditional crops, and then using winter varieties of say winter wheat, and winter rye for a double crop on the same acreage. That would make things pencil out easier.
In that way you would pay the same amount of taxes and yet getting a grain crop for your animals without really affecting your operation at all. You would be doing a Spring harvest too which might make things easier. Just store the grain over the summer and start feeding it out in the following winter.
I tried tilling some corn crops right after harvest, and then sowing winter rye and grazing that the following spring, but it did not work out very well. The rye came up, but there is a very narrow window when the rest of the vegetation is dead, and yet winter rye is green and in its prime for grazing. The sheep liked it...for about two weeks until the other grass came up, and then it became unpalatable for them. It did not really seem lie the cost of the rye justified the two weeks of early grazing I got, that's all. I suppose an argument could be made for having a cover crop on the corn ground all winter, and the tilling in the spring did get some nitrogen in the soil ???
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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I don't think I was very clear on the corn thing, which was my fault not yours. I don't store it in the conventional method in which you are thinking in that it is not straight grain. I chop the corn; stalk, cob, kernels and tassel in a chopper and then feed it out. A corn silage. The corn kernels just happen to be mixed in with the feed as its chopped up.
There is two ways I store it: in a big silage pile on the dairy farm and in whole stalks. I am not sure which way I am going with this. I did not get my silo or bunker built on my farm this year, so I get my silage from the dairy farm. Its less than ideal and I really need to get a bunker/silo made soon!
But I did harvest 1/2 an acre of corn manually, taking the stalks and and storing them under a tarp to keep them from getting wet. Being in full stalk form it has some issues. The first is birds and mice get at the kernels of corn because its not really protected, but the biggest issue is chopping up the stalks just prior to feeding out. I'm getting up there in sheep numbers now so that its starting to be a real time issue.
I think for me I will go with a bunker, but that is based on equipment I have access too. This is a silage that is chopped up in the field, blown into a truck and dumped in the bunker that is compacted with a tractor.
For others, I think the whole stalk storage idea may be easier. That is because the equipment needed is stuff everyone already has on hand...no fancy machinery needed. I would say with 25 animals or less, harvesting full length stalks and chopping them up would work okay. I am convinced that I could design a little better storage system for the stalks, and then maybe design something that chopped the stalks up a bit faster then my 5 hp homeowner brush chipper.
I just need to pick a system I guess and refine it until it works better for me.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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TSM...I only give my sheep grain or corn silage in the winter months. Its not ideal though. I noticed the sheep do really well in the spring and summer, but towards fall their conversion ratios start dropping right off. (For those that don't know...conversion is pounds gained per day). This is a real problem as I want to get my lambs from birth to slaughter quickly and to get a high weight so I get paid a decent amount of money. My target weight is 120 pounds live weight, which is around 60 pounds hanging weight. Watching my lambs grow like mad the first 100 days or so is great, but its frustrating for me to see those gains drop off just when the calls are coming in looking for lambs. It's tough saying "they are not ready yet".
So I am looking for a fall crop that would get the gains up quickly. If I can do this, then I can get my lambs to the slaughterhouse at the end of August instead of the the end of September, thus beating my competition.
I was thinking potatoes might work, but I don't think straight starch is the ideal way to put weight on sheep. Broccoli grows here as well, but I think they have the same feed properties of grass which is not going to lead to faster weight gains either. I know turnips do well at fall finishing, but they don't grow that well here. So I am still thinking and researching and I certainly don't have all the answers.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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I don't think you can go wrong with oats, it has worked well for me here, both with the sheep and on the dairy farm. Part of the reason is how easy it is to buy oat seed. Just buy whole oats at your local feed store, sow it, and lightly till it under. In about 5 days it will start coming up. I have been told you cannot use feed oats as a seed, but I have done it for years and they grow just fine.
The oats do not even have to be matured to give an excellent feed. Green chopped oats make the cows milk like crazy on the dairy farm. For years we grew potatoes, but every other year, in order to give the soil a break from nutrient robbing potatoes, we grew oats as a type of green manure. Of course we chopped off a crop or two of the green oats before they matured and the milk production soared.
But of course you could wait too and then get the matured oat grains and feed that as a type of grain in the winter. I have never done this, but I was told for sheep it has too much zinc in it. I don't understand how it could though if it was grown on your own land with low zinc levels in the soil?
I will say though, that I think you are on the right path. I have always found my animals do better on a mix of grains and grass. Right now all the rage is grass fed animals, but I think the market is not from the grass-only aspect, but from the fact that a consumer knows what is in the animal. I think being able to say "all the feed my animals consume is raised right here on the farm", holds just as much appeal as "grass raised".
And raising your own feed is along the lines of what I have always said, to be efficient you have to see where your money is going, and then eliminate that expense. If you are spending $500 bucks a year on grain in a bag, then its pretty obvious you can grow a lot of feed for the same amount of money. You just got to keep that figure in mind as you raise your own feed.
******
Tell a welfare recipient they must work and they call their congressman. Tell a farmer he can no longer work and he commits suicide. No wonder 1/2% of the population feeds the other 99-1/2%!!
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| We try to grow as much as we can in sunflowers. It's great for your chickens when they go through a molting.
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I’ve been thinking about, studying, and researching this very topic all year. Next year I’m going to try raising almost all my own feed for poultry, rabbits, and catfish. You can’t save money raising animals feeding store bought food. As Drawbar has pointed out before, the economics of scale won’t allow a small hobby farmer to raise animals as cheaply as the big boys who buy feed in huge quantities and live on a very small margin per animal. I keep animals for fun and food only, not profit, so I could accept the fact that I’m not really saving any money. However, I’m going to try raising animals with feed I produce myself and see if I can save money. Here is my plan: This fall I planted small plots of wheat and alfalfa. I plan to use some of the wheat myself, and feed the rest to poultry. When the wheat is out in June I want to plant squash, pumpkins, watermelon, sugar beets, mangles, and turnips in the wheat stubble and just let them grow and see what happens. The alfalfa I planned to convert into pellets using a pellet machine. The heavy rains and cold weather in October ruined my alfalfa planting, so now I will have to either buy alfalfa, or substitute some other feed until I can get a new stand established. I also have one more option. There is a large patch of red clover growing in the right of way along the highway near where I work. I plan to cut that clover when it’s ready and stuff it into trash bags. I don’t need tons of hay and that clover might be just enough to see me through next summer. Whatever amount I get it’s free. I’m about halfway finished clearing a one-acre field on my dad’s place that has grown up in saplings. Next summer I intend to plant an open pollinated variety of field corn, probably Reids Yellow Dent. I would like to plant about ¼ acre, which should produce at least 25 bushels, maybe a little more. In that same field, I want to plant about ¼ acre of sweet sorghum. My family wants to press and cook sorghum syrup at our family campout in September, and then I will use the grain from the sweet sorghum for poultry. If I had cattle or goats, I could feed them the sweet sorghum stalks. I will probably give the pressed cane to a neighbor who has cows. ¼ acre of sweet sorghum will probably produce 15-20 bushels of grain. I have another large garden plot where I want to devote a little space to a red variety of heirloom corn and some more sweet sorghum, as a back up. I tilled under a green manure crop of buckwheat in that field today, along with a thick layer of leaves. Next month I’m ordering several pounds of earthworms. I have a very small pond where I want to raise about 100 catfish. My dad wants to try raising catfish in a 55 gallon barrel. I have a plan from Organic Gardening that shows how to raise catfish in a barrel using earthworms as feed, so we want to see if we can duplicate that process. If I have any leftover worms, I can feed them to the poultry. If I can find a reasonably priced pellet machine I would like to make a standard feed for poultry, catfish, and rabbits that contains about 2/3 alfalfa/clover, and 1/3 corn/sorghum. I can then supplement their feed using whatever else I have available, and maybe a mineral mix as well. I bought a solar powered electric fence charger and 1900 feet of electric fencing so I can build a triple strand electric fence. The plan is to give my poultry plenty of free range so they can eat as much free forage as possible, while keeping them safe during the day. They will still have to be locked up at night. I need to produce enough feed for about 12 laying hens, 25 broilers, 8 geese, 12 turkeys, 140 catfish, and three rabbits plus the litters from two does. This plan might not produce record growth rates, but I don’t care if I’m getting most of my feed for little, or even no cost. Anyway, that’s the plan. Maybe I’m crazy and the plan won’t work, but it will be interesting to experiment. We’ll see how it works come next fall.
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| Have you thought of planting pole beans with your corn? When the corn gets up you will have the support that is needed for the pole beans. P2 does that all the time in his garden. It's easy on the back when picking.
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