365 Days of Photos: Day 13

Planting Onions

This year I was on top of things with planting my onions ... maybe a little too on top of it. As soon as plants and bulbs came in to our local feed store in mid-February, I bought what I needed and started planting my Vandalia onion plants. With two more varieties to plant, a winter storm, probably the worst of the 2012-13 season, blew in. This was a long winded storm lasting about 2 weeks. During which we received 6-8 inches of sleet/snow and fairly cold weather.

I had mulched the onion plants but the cold had taken some of the tops off. I'm not confident about my accessment of the Vandalia onion plants survival but the bulbs didn't seem to freeze and there is a small amount of green remaining at the base of the leaves. Time will tell.

365 Days of Photos: Day 12

365 Days of Photos: Day 11

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.

Hallelujah! A blogger app for my phone!

I have been watching for a blogger app to make posting easier.. and finally it's available!  I think it was actually available awhile ago but I'm so busy I haven't checked for awhile.  So hopefully this will make it easier..  it'll certainly make adding pictures easier.

100 egg Kerosene Incubator/Hatcher Design Pains

I mentioned in a previous post that one of my projects in planning us a Kerosene Heated Egg Incubator/Hatcher. You can buy one from Lehman's. That's $400 I certainly don't have. They are more readily available overseas (i.e. Africa and India). And you can occasionally find an old used one a farmer is selling. So I've been looking for information about how to build one... that's been as difficult as if not more so than finding one for sale. As a digression, I'd rather like to build a solar one which DO EXIST.. in AFRICA! The problem is the information veritably nonexistent. So back to the topic on hand, a kerosene incubator is a more likely candidate at this time.

Informationwise, I've found two designs:

• A Kerosene Fired 180 egg cabinet incubator. Done by a gentleman in Haiti. (.pdf file)
• The Peace Corps Poultry Training Manual from 1981. (scroll to the end)

I like the simplicity of the Peace Corps design but their lack of dimensions and instruction makes it a little difficult. You have to do a little guesstimating. I prefer the thermostat wafer set up in the cabinet incubator. Whatever the case, I have a very good start on my detailed design. Lots of notes and a possible design on a manual egg turner ran on the horizontal plane similar to what you'd find in a HovaBator or such.

With just an egg tray, where I'd have to hand turn the eggs individually, it would fit around 100 chicken eggs, 80-100 duck eggs (depends on breed) or 40-50 goose eggs. Then, of course, a bazillion quail eggs... I've added a hatching cage to the design as well. This was a must after my first incubator design flaw (that's another story) of NOT having one.

It's my desire to keep y'all posted in its progress but you know how that can go...