Growing your own feed

One of the ideas that I had in my early farming dreams was raising the feed for my animals on my own ground.  In industry they call it vertical integration.  Not a new idea by any stretch, but one that seems to be particularly attractive to farmers.  

The livestock that I have is primarily pigs, but I'm transitioning to cows and I expect I'll have more pounds of cows (animal units of cows) by 2017... but pigs and cows eat different things, so to pursue the dream of producing my own feed I have to go two different directions.  

The last of the corn going in.  If you look carefully in the distance you'll see the tractor

 For forage production, and I'm talking about hay and alfalfa here, the basic strategy is to provide enough grazing space that during the growing season the animals can feed themselves, and to have enough non or minimally grazed space so that you can put away enough hay to feed the animals through the winter.  right now that looks like 1 acre per cow for grazing, and one acre for haying.   So for 25 cows, which is where I'm at now, I need about 50 acres of forage crops.

I call them crops because they're planted; you use a different device to get the crop in, but it takes some time and effort to do it right.   One established there's the time and effort to bring the crop into the barn, and even the grazed areas need some care and attention.  Mowing, to keep the weeds from developing seedheads, observation to avoid bare spots (and replant any that appear) and moving the cows from place to place to make sure that the pasture gets rest periods for regrowth.
 

only two more rows to go

This is my third year of raising corn, and I'm getting better at it.  I spent 30 hours of wrench-time to get the john deere 7000 4-row planter into perfect shape this year; purchased new seed meters, replaced a couple of opening disks and went over it carefully and replaced all of the nuts and bolts that were worn or stripped, and greased the whole thing prior to planting.  The result of it is that it worked perfectly, and I have to admit some satisfaction when somehting just works without a hitch.   Well, the hitch was the 30 hours of labor, but this year it was at a time and place of my choosing, which beats the heck out of having it happen in the middle of a field or in the middle of a planting.  I'm learning to schedule my "emergencies", and I'm learning not to put off maintenance; or at the very least, to make a list of things so that I can do it during non-peak seasons.

the 20 or so acres of corn I've put in this year in theory will produce 87 or so tons of corn at the end of the season -- not silage, but the grain corn itself.  That's calculated to be enough to feed the pigs through an entire year with the carbohydrate portion of their diet.   So far so good.  I'm hoping that I can get it in, and store it, in good enough shape that I can substantially reduce my feed order starting this fall.

With the forage I'm about 33% done with that already.  I'll take another hay cutting around june 20th, weather permitting, and if that works out that'll put me well over 50% on the forage side.

So it's a little like managing two different projects.  

Pictures taken where the orange, yellow and red lines intersect, facing north towards the river