Growing your own grain-WSU small grains seminar

It's taken me a while to write this entry because I got so much out of the presentation that WSU put on about raising small grains for both human and animal consumption. 

 

 My basic interest in this is the ability to grow more of the feed and more types of food for both humans and livestock.  With the new farm, I've got enough land that I could actually raise quite a bit of grain if I chose; and having some sort of crop rotation seems like a very good idea if I'd like to increase the fertility of the land and reduce crop-related pests. 

I am not the only one who thinks that growing grains and forage is a good idea.  I'd guess that this field session was attended by about 400 people.  They had samples from their bread lab, which I'll take about in another post.  The bread lab is cool all by itself. 



 

 Each researcher had a field or several fields where they were looking at things like the effect of various types of fertilizer and crop rotations and other variables.   They'd plant the wheat and note how it worked out.  Some varieties failed; local diseases and parasites nailed them.  Others thrived.   For the ones that did well, they passed the finished wheat off to the next step, brewers and bakers, and then reported things like how the grain tasted and how it worked out.  It's pretty rare to get the information on the entire chain of consumption in one place.  Each researcher would stand in front of their plot, talk about what they were doing, how each variety did (this one failed, this one thrived, we like this one because it doesn't lodge as badly as this one, etc.   'lodge' is the term used when full stalks of wheat fall over before harvest, wasting the grain.  )

For the presentation they'd labeled each grain, so you could clearly see the characteristics of each type.  They had 42,000.   (Forty two THOUSAND) types of grain growing at this facility this year. 
Forty thousand types of grain.  Who knew? 

 The tag on the right is particularly interesting to me.  So land about 20 miles away from me, in the same sort of soil and with the same weather patterns, produced over 3 tons of grain per acre.  3 tons of grain would feed a sow and piglets for roughly 2 years.  This sort of number gives me an idea of how many acres I'd have to devote to grow all of the feed for my pigs.   Yes, you nutritionists out there, I'm ignoring the fact that it's really, really hard to grow protein in vegetable form around here. 

 This is a potato experiment that is looking at the effect of crop rotation and compost and standard fertilizer on potato yields.  They're also looking at biosolids (treated sewage by-product) to see how it grows crops.  Not a big fan of biosolids, but that's what manure is, too. 

 This variety of grain was both high-yielding and was voted as best tasting. 

Andrew Corbin is a researcher who planted alfalfa in the fall of last year, 7 varieties and has been tracking growth and production since.  he's standing in his alfalfa field which has already had a first cutting and is about to be cut for a second time.  This is REALLY exciting to me, as alfalfa is the single largest expense when you're forage feeding dairy cows.  I was really glad to see his presentation, and its given me 7 varieties to choose from for my own field tests. 

 Thank you Andrew!  Thank you!



 The handout that Andrew had prepared has several graphs of yields, growth, plant date, tested forage values and so on for each type of alfalfa.  I'm looking for a seeder now and looking forward to trying some alfalfa of my own!