growing organic corn

Corn gets a bad name because it's associated with all of the stuff that people consider evil.  It's often a GMO, it's grown in huge monocrop farms, and it's used to produce stuff like corn syrup and ethanol, and every one of those things has someone that hates it. 

Organic corn row.  Note weeds between rows. 

  But we have to remember that, like grass and clover, corn is a plant, and it's a pretty good plant.  It's been popular here in America for at least 6 thousand years, and for a reason.  Acre for acre, it's hard to beat corn for feeding livestock. 

Conventional corn field, roundup ready corn.  No weeds.  None. 

So corn gets a bad reputation, but it's not corns fault.  There are varieties of corn that aren't GMO, that are not grown with chemicals, and, honestly, corn is  just a plant.  So when I'm looking at feeding cows, one of the common things that I see in cows diets is corn silage. 

Silage is just the whole corn plant chopped up.  Stalk, leaves, cob, the whole thing.  Chopped up fine and then typically used as a part of a ration for a dairy or beef cow.  I don't think that corn is evil, but if I'm going to grow corn, I'd like to do it with open-pollinated varieties and without chemical sprays.  Organically grown. 

Many of the weeds are palatable to cattle, so while it's not pretty, in my book it's ok. 

So today I spent some time talking with a farmer nearby who's growing some organic silage corn.  We talked about what he did to prepare his fields, and what his yields are, and generally speaking about what he had to do to make the crop work out for him.  Then we talked about the price bonus he gets from being organic.

The basic cow feed that I'm working on is some sort of grass hay (probably orchard grass because it grows well for many farmers here) some sort of legume (probably red clover or alfalfa because it grows well around here) and some sort of silage (corn, but also grass and legume silage). 

We do not get weather hot enough or dry enough to actually dry the hay in the fields (both grass and legume hay), at least not early in the season.  So most farmers here cut the grass wet and make haylage out of it.  They get it as dry as they can, and then pack it into air-tight bales and let it ferment a little; it comes out smelling a little like vinegar, and the cows seem to like it.  It also keeps fairly well wrapped; certainly a year, but most of the farmers talk about 2 years as being pretty common.  

The first cutting is made into haylage, and the 2nd and 3rd cuttings, the finer, leafier hay, gets cut and dried and baled as dry hay.  Some producers around here just wait until the weather turns warmer to make their first cutting, but I've found that the hay produced isn't very palatable to my animals.  Given the choice between a 2nd cutting and stemmy first cutting, they'll finish off the 2nd cutting completely. 

I don't know much about the production of forage, and that's why I'm spending months talking to other farmers around here and watching what they do to make theirs.  If I'm going to be feeding and milking animals, I need to get the diet right, and I'd like to have as little off-farm feed as I possibly can. 

the conventional corn silage is producing 27 tons per acre; at 40lbs a cow a day, that's 1350 cow-days per acre of feed, or basically enough forage for 3.5 cows per acre of corn.   So 20 acres of corn  will feed 74 cows, give or take...  that's about the right amount for a 40 cow dairy, including replacement heifers. 

I feel like this is a puzzle.  I'm slowing finding pieces that fit. 

So if you'd like to see some graphs about what kinds of corn are being used and other corn facts, check out this link.   I particularly liked the note that while a very large percentage of US corn is now GMO (presumably for increased yields) the yields haven't really changed all that much.  So the GMO yield thing isn't working as advertised, apparently. 

Advantage small farms have over large...

I was reading an article about farming, big farming.  It was written to explain the commodity markets and looked at the long term profitability of commodity farms -- farms that grow most of what we eat.  Soybeans and corn.   The conclusion?  Several that were interesting: 

1) commodity farms have, in the long term, zero profit.  Yes, they do well some years, and other years not so good.  But over the long term they aren't profitable.  For every good corn year you'll get a bad one.  Same for soybeans. 
2) Crop prices are rising, but so are input prices -- the stuff you buy to grow the crops.  So the overall dollars spent on the crops are going up, but the amount that the farmer keeps is shrinking
3) Small farmers have some big advantages over larger ones.  Here's the quote: 

"The nice woman selling you tomatoes at the farmers market has all manner of ways of distinguishing her product—she's offering such-and-such varieties, grown by this or that method, on some particular piece of land. And she has a range of customers—the teeming hordes of individuals who stream into farmers markets these days—to whom she can make her pitch. The customers may be price-conscious, but they came to the farmers market because they have more than just price in mind: Some combination of quality, locality, aversion to chemicals or what have you all factor into each buyer's decision.

Now consider the farmer with 5,000 acres of corn and soy in Iowa. His products are essentially identical to those of hundreds of thousands of similar farmers—and not just in the US corn belt, but also in places like Brazil and Argentina. Their products won't be sold to individual consumers. They'll be mixed together and processed industrially and end up as, say, livestock feed, car fuel, or cooking oil. "

Being a small farm, closer to your market, and selling directly to consumers is how I've found my farm to grow and be profitable; and I absolutely agree with what he's saying.  Commodities, long term, suck. 

He also points out something that I think americans have forgotten about when we say we hate farm subsidies:  People like stable, low food prices, and we all have to eat.  There's a reason we spend billions of dollars, and sure, some of that is wasted money, but it solves a problem, too.  Food riots are ugly. 

You'll find the original article here. 

Winter chicks & chickens

The local feed store purchased some late season chicks, and got tired of feeding them after 6 weeks; they were originally $2.99, but they marked them down to $0.50/each.  So I bought dozens and dozens. 

Such a deal!  I didn't have to feed them for 6 weeks, no shipping mortality, and they were common breeds that I like:  barred rock, white leghorn and rhode island red hens.  So I set up the brooder and I'm raising them for sale next spring as laying hens. 

The brooder is the one that I wrote about building a few years ago, and it is still going strong.  It can easily brood out a couple of hundred small chicks, maybe 150 or so as they get larger.  It's no big deal to keep chickens in the winter; once they're feathered out they keep themselves pretty warm.  A draft free roosting area, water and food, and they're good to go.  this brooding area has a door to an outside chicken run, and when they get big enough they'll have access. 

Love bargain chickens!