Insourcing Feed

This post about growing your own feed got my brain cranking... And while I made comments on the post itself I have some things I'd like to address.

As Bruce's post said, a lot of small farmers would like to grow their own livestock feed be it hay or grains. It's not a bad desire, it's just an 'is it feasible?' desire.

We've been trying to accomplish this ourselves for years. We raise pigs and have dairy cows. These two farming enterprises require high inputs. Pigs have high quantity and dairy cows are high quality. Buying in feed for either sucks the pocket dry if you're not careful.

Techniques We've Done Historically

How do you do it? Welllll, that's the million dollar question. Equipment is expensive. Especially harvesting equipment and that is also proprietary. So we don't harvest it we let the animals do the work. We haven't been able to get a consistent year round rotation but we're hoping to change that this year since we now have a tractor and have acquired small scale tilling and planting implements. But before our pigs were our implements. After they were through an area we'd broadcast something. Generally we used turnips, oats, amaramth, wheat or milo and have had varying results. The optimum timing was to broadcast right after the pigs left. For some seeds, it was helpful if it was something being fed to the hogs. So it would be tossed in long lines on the ground. The pigs would eat, trample and turn it in. This is a little more uneven but it works fairly consistently. All the same our attempts usually resulted in some kind of increased diversity of pasture.

While all that is fine and good, it doesn't really extend your green season or reduce the need to buy in feed.

Our Future Path

Our goal this spring is to create higher density forage that will actually provide feed replacement. This means tilling and planting acres worth of area with balanced diversity. A field of green tops are great for ruminants but only act as a feed supplement NOT a feed replacement in hogs. In that regard, it's significantly easier to improve fodder for ruminants than repace feed for hogs.

We had an intriguing occurrence once early on with a hog. We stuck him in my 60x60 ft garden area. I was experimenting with a Fukuoka system of garden which was failing because I used ladino clover rather than white dutch. So I had a garden area with poorly growing sweet potatoes some other poor doing vegetables and a rather thick stand of clover. He went off feed. Didn't act or look sick but he didn't want the grain. I was weight taping him regularly. The first week he gained 40-50 lbs. This took him to finish weight with no grain. We were pretty astounded!

So how do we recreate this on a field scale? Unfortunately, the first step is understanding the nutritional requirements for the animals. All livestock have needed requirements to achieve their growth rate potential. For example, hogs main growth limitation is protein, in particular, lysine. A traditional high lysine hog feed is barley. In China, amaranth was commonly used. Amaranth is another good lysine rich feed.

This is companion planting on a much larger scale with slightly different reasoning as to why. So for a summer planting and fall harvest you could plant amaranth, cowpeas (we're avoiding soy here as well)  and turnips. For midsummer harvest, you'd be looking at barley, oats and winter peas. Spring harvest is a little more on the greener side so supplemental grain would be likely needed. For spring harvest: kale, turnips and oats.

Winter is the hardest. A note for leaving standing grain, such as corn, in the field over winter to be harvested this way: mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are a bad bad deal. If in excess they will cause gain issues, fertility issues and psudeo-pregnacies. Take these very seriously when dealing with hogs we learned the hard way. Ruminants seem to be able to deal with them better but it's still not a good thing for them. They mainly occur when grain is left dry in the field for too long of period. So those corn fields that sit there forever are at high risk for mycotoxins. This really goes for any grain crop. Getting wet when ready to be harvested creates problems with molds and fungus. So for winter, a good plan would be a green annual like July/August planted winter wheat, May planted field pumpkins (left in the field they'll keep) and July/August winter radishes (i.e. diakons). Both diakons and wheat will broadcast but your best bet would be row cropping. So plant pumpkin rows far enough apart to till and plant between them. Such is the fun of figuring out feed replacement ..

<b>Final Musings</b>

Hopefully this helps plant the seed of how to possibly insource most all your livestock feed. I know I mainly only addressed hogs but ruminants are a little easier to work out. I will make this wise recommendation, keep some hay and grain around. A bad winter storm can leave self harvest crops inaccessible. Drought can cause crop failure and leave some crops poisonous (look into prussic acid and the related crops). So always have something so you're not scrambling later.