The farm cycle

[Miss Kay]

We raise just about everything and find that we have way more than we can use. We may sell milk in the future but Texas has a lot of hoops to jump through before that is allowed. In the meantime, we try to find a use for everything here on the farm. So, here’s how it works. We have Guernseys (Oh my do we love our girls) that are grass fed mostly and our lactating cow is currently producing 4 gallons a day. I make cheese and everything else you can think of but no way can 3 people use 4 gallons a day so we feed it to the chickens. I refuse to do dairy barn bottle calves since we have a closed herd (use AI) and don’t want to introduce disease to the farm. We raise our own chickens and do pretty good selling them just before they begin to lay. I have a small flock that gives us at least a dozen a day on milk, scraps, and grass alone so no cash outlay. Again, I can only force the guys to eat so many eggs so the left overs get boiled and fed to the turkeys. I hatch my own turkeys and raise them out to put in the freezer. We do the midget whites and boy that sure do taste good. So, they grow on milk and eggs and all the grass and bugs they can find. At this point we buy very little feed for the cow who in turn feeds the chickens who feed the turkeys, not to mention what we get to eat on a daily basis. If I didn’t have a freezer full of pork I’d get her to raise a pig for me and will in the future. I’m hoping for heifer calves this year but could use a good grass fed steer to go in the freezer since we are about burnt out on pork. Anyone else have their own food chain going on the farm?

[BlueRose]

You are very lucky. I hope to be at that point in a couple more years. However, I will have dairy goats instead of cows. Small acreage makes it hard to have the animals I wish.

I do not understand all the laws that Government put on us 'farmers'. I have a neighbor here who has a traders circle going. Milk for one's chickens, turkeys for other items, etc.

Can you set something like that up with your neighbors and others in your area.

[Miss Kay]

Not in Texas. I have to have a milk parlor that meets their specifications and then lots of testing, fees, license, etc.. All that costs money so once we go that route, we'll have to have several to make it worth the effort.

[Elizabeth]

Love the idea, but we have found that trying to raise too much livestock does not fit in with our lifestyle right now. Hubby had a grass based dairy farm (cows) for a number of years before we met, and I am soooo happy he got out of that. I have no desire to go out to milk twice a day when it is 40 below in the winter (we live in Minnesota).

We have talked often about wanting a milk goat or two, especially now that we have a toddler in the family, but it would just be too confining at this point. We have too many hobbies and other interests which take us off the farm just a little too often to be able to handle milking anything.

[Miss Kay]

It is not for everyone and not even for all phases of life. But when it is, it is wonderful. I know as we grow older there will come a day when we must get rid of the girls but I know our life will not be nearly as full. We do as many dairies in Austraila, we milk once a day. That means we pick the time of day that works for us and here, the sun is always shinning and flip flop weather nearly year round so it is not the challange that it would be north of us.

[SFM in KY]

I pretty much grew up that way on the ranch in MT. Beef cattle were our 'cash crop' with a cow/calf operation. Calves were weaned and sold in the fall and we didn't eat our cash crop. Had several Hereford cows with a strain of Shorthorn that we milked twice a day ... calves got half and we got half and you had to be a fast milker so you were finished with your side when the calf was finished with his.

We had hogs and chickens. Butchered one hog in the fall when it was cool, cured the hams, ate the rest fresh, sold the others. Raised chickens, had eggs and bought hatchery chicks in the spring as well. We ate eggs and fresh chickens in the summer, no electricity so no way to preserve meat other than canning, although we did can some chicken.

We made butter, the extra milk was given to the hogs and chickens, we raised a little grain, wheat (chickens), oats (work horses) and barley (hogs). In the fall when it was cold enough for fresh meat to keep hanging in the shed, we hunted deer.

Big garden, of course, ate fresh in the summer and canned for winter. The chicken house got cleaned every spring and that fertilized the gardens.

[Awnry Abe]

We are starting to see some of the benefits of an interwoven homestead, but we still have a few things out of balance. I find it very fulfilling to see some gap that we currently filling via an input to the farm, and to close that gap with something from the farm.

Have you heard of the concept of applying raw milk to pasture? Not for it's NPK, but as a probiotic of sorts.

@SFM, I know exactly what you mean about racing a calf at milking time. I am glad to hear that we are the only ones to do so. I thought we were loons for trying, but it works.

[highlands]

Anyone else have their own food chain going on the farm?

Our major input is sunshine and rain. Plus nitrogen and carbon from the air.

We have a lot of pasture, but not to sell hay. Our pasture feeds our chickens, ducks, geese and pigs. We don't buy fertilizers - we plant legumes.

We grow a lot of pumpkins, sunflowers, turnips, kale, rape, sunchokes and other things - roughly 40 acres between what is in the pastures and what is in the winter paddocks. But we don't sell those crops.

We raise a lot of poultry. Our birds eat our pasture, veggies, fruit, insects, mice, snakes (warm months) and pigs (winter - trim). We almost never buy any hen feed since they eat what we produce year round. The hens lay a lot of eggs. But we don't sell eggs or chickens.

We raise a lot of pigs. Our pigs eat our pastures, eggs, apples, pears, pumpkins, etc. The pigs we sell. The pigs are our end products. Our pigs pay the mortgage, they earn us our living - we are pastured pig farmers.

Raising pigs on pasture and growing as much of their food as possible gives us vertical integration and control over quality and costs. We don't buy any commercial pig feed or the corn/soy/etc feed grains.

We have some external inputs, like winter hay and the whey, but we can, and have done without those at various times. We use the resources that are available. We can produced everything from the pastures to the finished pork. I do find it more efficient to buy in hay than to cut our own hay on our steep rocky hills. Instead I use our pastures for pasturing during the warm months.

If we didn't have the whey I would keep cows or goats to produce milk to produce pigs to have pasture/milk fed pork to sell. Right now I don't have to since there is a cheese maker on the other side of the mountain who needs to get rid of his whey.

When available we get a little bit of spent barley from a local beer pub but that doesn't go far with 400 pigs - I, and the pigs, would love to get more but we make do with what we have. Most of their diet is our pastures which is our biggest resource. See http://SugarMtnFarm.com/pigs for more about what our pigs eat.

We deliver weekly to local stores, restaurants and individuals so we have the distribution covered - my wife does the trucking.

The next step for us is bringing home the pig-to-pork processing: slaughter, butcher, sausage, brine, smoke, ferment, cooking (lard, ribs), etc. We're building our own USDA/State inspected on-farm meat processing facility so we'll be able to take on that step of the process to for more vertical integration. Since we deliver weekly it is worth it for us to have that step under our control and it will pay for itself. As most people with livestock know, getting good butchering is difficult. Currently, my wife has to drive a whole day each week to deliver pigs to the butcher and then pickup our meat - she looks forward to having it on-farm.

At home, pork, eggs and chicken are what we tend to eat for animal products in addition to the veggies and fruit we grow. Lamb and mutton in the years we have sheep as well. Very little fish or beef since we don't have cattle and we live far from the ocean or other sources of fish. Those are treats. I have no moral or ethical issue with having the occasional treat, just expense.

Cheers,

-Walter

[Miss Kay]

Boy you are so right about that processing. The processers here are horrible so we had to drive 8 hours away to find a good one. That was the main reason we stopped raising pork. Since it was not our main source of income it was more trouble than it was worth but if I were young, I would have loved to do the butcher shop like you are. No doubt that is going to pay off plenty.

[Kaitlin]

Highlands, that is doing it PROPERLY. So well thought out. I am in awe!

[Big Dave]

Working on it Miss Kay, working on it.

[nostawmama]

I don't have a farm cycle yet but I can envision what you have because it is what I want for my homestead! As little outside input as possible with everything having a symbiotic relationship- glad to see I am not crazy for thinking it will work!

[RomeGrower]

Only in the sense that what goes in the compost goes in the garden and what is left over from the garden goes in the compost. It's a beautiful thing.

[highlands]

Originally Posted by Kaitlin

Highlands, that is doing it PROPERLY. So well thought out. I am in awe!

It took decades to get this far and I feel like there are still so man things to improve. We make things better every year, every month, every week... It's a process. Sometimes there are setbacks but we keep plugging. When we look back ten, twenty, thirty years we see progress. What is most awesome is doing it together as a family. Our kids are very into making it all work.

[Wendy]

Not in Texas. I have to have a milk parlor that meets their specifications and then lots of testing, fees, license, etc.. All that costs money so once we go that route, we'll have to have several to make it worth the effort.

Maybe you should just SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

We raise a lot of our food. Scraps go to chickens. I raise rabbits, ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys, goats, & whatever else I can get ahold of. It's a wonderful thing raising your own food!

[farmerDale]

Our farm cycle is much like some of the aformentioned stuff. BUT as long as you are removing pounds of product and consuming it, we need to remember we are mining our soil, unless we bring in outside nutrients. Highlands grows legumes, and so do I, and this is great, but how are we replacing all the non-nitrogen lost nutrients that are being mined, and exported from the soil pool. Unfortunately, there is no real way to maintain a balance unless you import nutrients of some kind to offset that which we remove over time.

This indeed is the farmers' conundrum. Maintaining the soil, and maintaining nutrients, while exporting many tons of products. Not as simple as it first appears, and while highly sought after, to be completely self sufficient in nutrients is not possible unless importing from somewhere else.

A great example would be my sheep manure for my garden. I feed my sheep hay for almost half the year, and get their manure from their feeding areas. The hay I feed them, has come off a field from a mile away. I have to fertilize that hay to maintain its production, as removing this hay would be mining the soil bank if I never gave back what is being removed.

[highlands]

We buy in winter hay which brings in nutrients - this is a big part of why we buy in winter hay rather than producing our own hay as I had once thought to do. We can hay here if needed to do so (e.g., End of the World Scenarios) but hay is readily available here so I go that route.

A lot of nutrients beyond nitrogen are pulled down by plants from the atmosphere and deposited in the soil by the plants. Literally tons of carbon - about 1.4 tons per acre per year which on an extensive system amounts to a huge input from the sky.

Our soils are mineral rich - lots of stone that will leach for hundreds of millions of years thanks to acid rain.

Something else that helps is we use a lot of land, very extensive farming, rather than cropping a small area. As the animals graze they return >90% of the nutrients to the soil. I leave areas empty for a year so the plants can go to seed and spread themselves as well as adjusting the grazing times to produce this. That way the plants that are best fit for our climate and soils spread.

Something I am looking forward to when we have our own on-farm processing is that the ~50% of the animal that is offal (guts, etc) we will return to our soil in compost. Right now only about 25% returns since the slaughterhouse keeps the guts. Nutrient recapture is important. By maximizing the amount of recapture we are building our soils rather than depleting them.

Another thing to realize on the nutrient export is to compare it as dry matter. In a moist climate like ours for example, the incoming rain is so much greater than our need that exporting water (e.g., in meat) does not matter when considering the nutrients. Meat, which is what we export, is mostly water. The bones, which are the least water, are also the most likely thing to stay here on our soils as we debone a lot of the meat - consumer demand so that bones which do not sell go into our dogs and thus back to our soil or into our compost and thus back to our soil.

Cheers,

-Walter

[K.B.]

We are still too early in the homesteading process (2 years) to be able to provide most of the feed for any livestock, so we don't have any yet (except bees ).

While I am developing the orchard, gardens and other areas around the house site, I am always planning and looking for more ways that I can raise additional fodder/feed for future rabbits, ducks, chickens, fish and goats. I tend to focus on establishing perennial sources of food (trees, bushes, vines, low-growing plants, veg, roots and fungi) for us and the future animals.

Right now, the wildlife (turkey, deer, hares, etc...) gets to enjoy some of the extras that get planted outside the fenced areas. They get to benefit from our activities with additional water and food, and we get to enjoy their products...

One other part of the cycle worth noting is human waste products. If you are living and eating on/near a property you are developing, the waste from the food scraps, urine, and feces is an easy to use source of nutrients to incorporate into the cycle.

With regards to importing/exporting of nutrients, it is easy to think in terms of land boundaries being important because we humans see them as important. Nature does not. Whether we like it or not, nature is always redistributing nutrients around a region. This is one reason why I like to always have water features as part of the landscape.

Water sources will draw attention from insects, animals and micro-organisms from miles around.