Umm, what's a mangel?

Mangels are huge beets mainly used for animal feed, but can be eaten by humans. I've read articles of them being fed to cows, rabbits, horses, chickens, pigs, and probably other animals that I'm forgetting right now.

They can be planted in early spring as soon as the soil can be worked. You don't want to harvest them until after the first frost. If harvested before a frost they will be bitter, the frost makes them sweeten.

I'm not sure about other animals, but they shouldn't be fed to rabbits before the first frost. I don't know if it's because of sugar content or some other reason. To be on the safe side, I don't plan to feed them to any animals until after the first frost.

I've read that you can turn cattle in to eat the tops, then dig the roots that you want to keep over winter, then turn pigs in to eat the rest of the roots.

The mangels will grow to about 2 feet tall. About 1/2 of the beet will be above ground, so there's no danger that you'll miss any of them and leave them in the ground to go to waste.

You can make sugar from them, beet pulp, and cut them up for feed. You can leave them in the ground until a hard freeze makes them heave out of the soil (making it easier to harvest them.)

I'm not sure about gathering seed. I would assume they seed like any other variety of beet, but I don't know that to be a fact.

They are an all round feed for animals that was used a lot in bygone years. The first article I read about them was written in 1918. Since then I've read several short articles about them and talked to a few old timers that remembered growing them many years ago.

That's what I've learned from my research. None of this info is first hand experience, it's all from articles I've read or passed on to me from elderly people I've talked with.

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The big problem with mangels is that they do not contain much dry matter. So while they do have some good feed qualities it takes a lot of them to replace anything.
I have seen estimates of 4 tons might equal 1 ton of decent hay and I have seen estimates that say 1 ton of grain will equal 8-12 tons of mangels.
Once corn silage was developed, root crops fell out of favor for cattle feed because you could get the same feed value or more in a smaller package and usually with less labor. But in areas where corn won't grow they are still a good option if you do a little research into a proper ration including them. Get a Morrisons or some other good stock manual.
They should be cut or sliced before feeding and we used to have a cutter for that, a big hand cranked job. You can still find them occasionally at estate and old farm auctions. A good heavy knife would work too.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

Your welcome both.

I would certainly consider using them for a small farmer or homesteader as easy feed supplement and had planned on doing so for us in the future when we are settled and all set up at the new place.

Do keep in mind - these things are big at harvest time - I'm not sure how efficient they are to harvest if you do not have the right machinery to do so - they are big, cumbersome and heavy - I would not look forward to hand digging these out w/out a strong arm. If you just want to raise a row in the garden to supplement the bunnies etc, my guess is it would be alright to do manually, but when you talk about a field or more of these - you will need specialized equipment for easy harvesting and also picking up on a trailer...

When we were kids we used to get suckered into chopping them down to size to fit the shredder thingy - this was serious hard work - we used something similar to a combination axe + machette [sp?], it would take way too long with a regular knife if you have to feed multiple larger animals.

Just as a note from Feeds and Feeding

The chief nutrients in roots are carbohydrates largely cane sugar in beets and mangels and starch in potatoes.
They are low to fair in protein content, low in calcium, and only fair in phosphorous.
Carrots and sweet potatoes are rich in carotene, but other roots and tubers have little or no vitamin A value. Roots and tubers do not supply vitamin D. They are low in riboflavin but quite high on a dry basis in niacin.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

There's another thing to remember about what mangels are equal to as far as other food. If it were 4 tons of mangels for 1 ton of hay, consider that you can easily get 40 tons of mangels per acre. You'd have to get 10 tons of hay off that acre to equal that. If you planted 400 seeds, a half ounce, and the harvested beets averaged only 10#, that's 2 tons of feed. Properly spaced when planted, you could average 15# or 3 tons of harvest. That's a big return for so little initial expense.

Martin

If your seeds were sown the perfect distance apart and you didn't have to thin them. And you could get your cows to eat 4 times the amount of beets they would normally eat of hay.

Persnally I'd go for 20-30 tons of cornsilage and put it up in trash bags.
No thinnning, no roots to dig, corn easily runs through a chipper shredder.
Packing bags full of corn shouldn't be much worse than wrestling 40 tons of beets down to the cellar then back up again.

Looking at what roots are deficient in I would never use them as a hay replacement. And since most grains are deficient in the same areas upping your grain ration wouldn't help.
Vitamin A and D are very important to animals and if you replaced your hay with roots you would be shorting them on those.
However a good sundried legume hay will be pretty rich with both, as well as calcium, protein, and many other vitamins.

Roots have their place but again, learn a bit about what animals need to grow and thrive before you decide to move into different feeds.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

Ok this has peeked my interest and I want to try some this year. We have both horses and soon next month chickens. Where can one find seeds?

Those are all valid points, but the idea isn't to replace their hay, but to supplement it.

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Paquebot (Martin) has seeds - look for his post on this thread.

For us, getting them out of the ground will be the hard part, if they get that big....but for getting them ready for animal feed...I am going to use our woodsplitter, lol! Why not? I tried it last year with our big rutabagas, worked really well.

I was off a bit on my cost to get a packet of 400 seeds out. Too heavy to come in under an ounce and too thick to qualify for large envelope rate. $3.38 is actual total cost for a US address. Believe it or not, total cost for a Canadian address would be 30¢ less. ($1.00 vs. $1.30 postage for 2-ounce package item.)

Martin

I'd be careful if raising and feeding mangels. We raised sugar beets and would turn our cows in on them during the winter and eat the tops. Occassionally they would find a small beet that would not go down and we'd have to use a hose to push them down if we caught them quick enough or they would die.

Bobg

Jungs and Shumway have them as well as fluidps source in Canada.

I was not the one who brought up replacing hay with roots I was pointing out that it was not a good idea.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

sammyd, I think you are bringing up some pretty valid points...but where I live, no one grows corn. Well, some people try (in their garden), but no one apparently gets a harvest. I am in Canada, Zone 3.

We have really hot temperatures during the day in the summer, but in the evenings, our temps plummet and from what I hear, this has something to do with the inability to grow corn. It is common for us to have a 30 degree Celsius swing. Plus, we don't have hay fields...well we do, but they haven't been worked in a long time. That is on our to do list, but probably won't happen for a few years.

We're working with a small area right now, that's why we wanted to try mangels. We're just trying to offset some of the feed cost. Hay up here isn't cheap, either

And your comment about lugging them down to cold room and back up...I totally agree with that! Really inefficient. I want to talk to my husband about setting something up down at the barn. It's worth a shot! Especially since I heard they can get to 20 lbs!! And we're not experienced farmers - we're just a couple newbies who've only been doing this for about a year and a half. It sure does help to read what other people think, gives me lots of food for thought, and thank you and the others for that!

hmmm which kind that they list is actually a mangel beet? I don't see it in the descriptions, and none of them seem big enough to "qualify" as a mangel beet...

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Can the mangels maybe be cut into quarters with a machete and maybe run through a chipper/shredder to cut down on the labor part or would that be too hard on the machine?? How hard are they, really?

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My How To blog - Happy Homesteading!

BBB, shouldn't have been difficult to find them on Jung's site unless something was wrong. 1. Go to site. 2. Click on Vegetables. 3. Click on Veg F-N. 4. Click on Mangels. That should have put you at: www.jungseed.com/sp.asp?c=584

FP, you've taken enough flak for wanting to grow some so just PM me with a mailing address. I'll donate a packet. Enough other HT members are quick to more than cover my costs on the Gardening Forum seed offer. Just consider it "Neighborly help and friendly advice.", the motto of Homesteading Today.

Martin

This topic is very helpful, I love this site. Thanks everyone.

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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards"

Keep in mind I'm writing this looking back at myself as a 10-12 yr old - they were hard to cut with a knife and you would need an oversize knife to begin with to get through the big ones. I recall the texture similar to a raw sweet potato - crisp and crunchy and quite hard - but it has been a long time for me - so the adult outlook I'm sure is somewhat different from when I was a kid.

As far as storage - they would not handcarry them into the storage area and back - my aunt/uncle had a drive-in semi root cellar [which did doubleduty in spring during the rainy season when it was pretty much empty for equipment storage] where they backed the trailer in and had one of those automatic unloader thingies in the trailer [I have no clue what they proper term for those are - I'm sure someone here can help me out with that]. They would store also potatoes, carrots, all kinds of other root vegetables and cabbages etc for winter storage in there. Some was for the household, but most for animal feed.

When they prepped a vat of pig slop, they would go in with a wheelbarrow and load it up with mangels and other produce to take over to the shredder to process. They used a simple wood chopping block and something that looked like a thick machete with a hook on the dull side, to split them into smaller pieces and then threw them straight into the shredder. The shredder was set up so it would spit the mangel bits straight into the vat, and the vat was on top of something that looked like a permanent cement BBQ grill with a wood fire underneath. This was open in front and back so once the fire was established, they simply slid large wood pieces underneath and later raked the ashes back out to go onto the manure pile. All this was set up close to the stables [but outside in the barn yard] where they kept the pigs to minimize having to carry the buckets too far. They would prep enough for 2-3 days at a time.

The neighbors with the horses and cows had their storage pile in the big barn - and they would simply open the huge double doors and back in with the tractor + trailer to unload straight on the ground in a corner and then cover them with straw [I dont think they would have used hay - as hay was limited and also open and not in bales].

You'd definitely would want your storage area somewhere close to where you actually feed them out, in order to reduce labor of hauling them back and forth.

Just remember to see what your animals need to grow and compare that to what you would like to feed. You may even have to look into different animals if you can not get the proper feed in a decent price range.

Definately get that hay ground back in shape.

I know that I haven't said much good about them but as I have said they do have their place. We will be trying a few ourselves this year since a pack of seeds magically appeared in our shopping cart at the Jungs store.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.