Growing Feed?
 

I remember seeing threads on this in the past, but a search didn't turn up what I was looking for.

What are the amounts of feed you need to grow to feed your own livestock? In a SHTF/EOTWAWKI situation, what would you be growing to winter your livestock (mostly breeding stock) over? How much would you need? I'm thinking rabbits, poultry, beef, milk, etc.

What would you need to grow if you just wanted to be self-sufficient, not in a SHTF-type scenario? What types of feed? In what quantities?

And if you wanted to grow your own feed just to save a little money, what would you grow? What would be the biggest savings to grow yourself compared to purchasing it? Including the time and effort to sow and harvest, how much of a savings is it, in other words, other than for the skills you gain, would you think it is "worth it"?

Kayleigh

Mangel beets are supposed to be good feed for rabbits. We feed a LOT of fallen fruit, pears, garden scraps and grass clippings this year in an effort to cut feed costs. They eat lentils also.

I planted one of the gardens in crimson clover but the drought ruined it.

Growing grains for feed and for us is our next major project towards self-sufficiency. We've had a little luck with wheat. As much as I hate it, we will probably devote some of the larger garden areas to corn next summer after the green beans come out. Corn is just so water and fertilizer intensive. It never seems like we get what we should out of it. But both the chickens and the rabbits will eat it.

And I doubt feed prices are going to get any better any time soon. The good news is that most feed stores well if it's packed decently.

Lowdown3

A lot will depend on how much livestock you wish to have and how much land you have to grow feed on. If you have a lot of land say ten acre or more and only one cow or a couple of goats two or three pigs and some chickens and perhaps some rabbits you could consider keeping most of the land in hay and harvesting it to feed the animals with also the produce of a large garden say at least an acre. The garden could be planted with a good deal of storage items such as potatoes , winter squash, and of course items such as tomatoes,peppers,so on to be canned. Going this rout would require that you keep the livestock in a corral . However if you have more land then you could keep the critters in a pasture and use another area for the harvesting of hay. Hay and pasture is a very inexpensive way of keeping the large animals and the chickens will do well in chicken tractors or allowed free range if you do not have to many predictors in the area. You do need some grain or mixed feed for the chickens. That can be grown in a small area of about an acre. Having said all of this you must keep in mind the small area would require you to have a piece of property that could be used for crops wall to wall so to speak. No big lawns for the house. It is not necessary to have lots of grain for cattle or hogs as they can be kept quite well on a basic hay diet. Garden scraps is of course a nice treat for them. Rabbits also do quite well on a mostly hay diet with a small amount of grain or ground feed for them. As for the exact amount of land that is somewhat difficult to figure out due to area you live in type of climate etc. will help determin that. What I just now spoke of generally fits in to the Midwest.

Seems to me unless you have trained working horses/mules AND the field equipment you would be very hard pressed to grow the acres of grain you are talking about, plus harvesting it, and safely storing it through the winter. SHTF/EOTWAWKI = NO FUEL for the equipment or the drying process for the grains. Buy and store enough NOW to get you through at least a year and hope like heck someone in your area can fill that particular gap. How do you plan to grow the grains you would need for your family's needs?

Your ability to raise, harvest, and store feed BY HAND will be a severe limiting factor in the amount of livestock you can raise. We only have one acre where we are now, but even if we had more land, I couldn't expand my livestock much beyond the few goats and chickens I have here. I'd probably add a small sturdy horse/draft pony; and I do plan to get a few rabbits, as it doesn't take much to feed them. But when you figure that even with pasture half the year, it takes a thousand pounds of hay to feed one goat through the year -- not including any grain they may need (don't need any unless they are milking, though), that's a lot of cutting with a scythe, a lot of raking, and turning with a fork, and a lot of hauling back to the barn to do all by hand. I figure a draft pony would provide enough help with the work to more than justify its keep, but there's another two or three tons of hay you'd need.

Now, if you have a large family including some strong, husky teenagers, you would be able to grow more than I could (as a single middle-aged lady with a bad back). But you'd have to feed the extra people, too.

If you were feeding year round (no pasture), one goat or sheep needs a ton of hay per year -- preferably alfalfa for milkers and young, growing stock. A doe in milk is going to need probably at least three hundred pounds of grain per year. And they need mineral salt.

A cow or horse needs several tons of hay; grain depends on the work they are doing (and their breeding -- some breeds are better suited to go with no or minimal grain than others). They also need mineral salt.

Rabbits and poultry are probably the easiest animals to feed if you are having to raise everything by hand, because they don't eat much. A half dozen chickens would get along pretty well on kitchen and garden scraps, and free range (though you wouldn't get as many eggs as if they had layer pellets). Rabbit hay can be made from weeds cut alongside the roads, if you don't have a yard big enough to raise your own.

The amount of land needed to grow one ton of hay is going to vary drastically, so you'll have to get those figures from local farmers. Here where we live now, some farmers get six tons of alfalfa to the acre, in three or four cuttings -- but that is with massive irrigation, fertilizer, and probably some herbicides. Without irrigation, we would do well to get 1 1/2 to 2 tons per acre on most of this area. When we lived in NH, I think the average in our area was 1 1/2 tons to the acre (no irrigation, grass hay). Places like the Willamette Valley of Oregon can get several tons of hay to the acre without irrigation. It all depends on where you live, and what the weather happens to be that year.

Kathleen

While I very seldom get involved in these fantasy threads, this one has piqued my interest, for some reason.

Point #1 - people were growing and storing cereal grains for thousands of years before the development of the first animal-powered agricultural machinery. I have grown oats as a cover crop. It was a good deal easier than growing a decent lawn.

Point #2 - what we feed livestock now is based on calculations regarding things like maximum efficiency in weight gain, or ideal balanced nutrition. Animals, including domesticated animals, survived for eons on whatever was available. They could do so again.

Point #3 - I have noticed that you "prepper" types are obsessively concerned with secrecy. So allow me to suggest an excellent human/animal food that can be planted now (since it is a perennial), looks much less like food to a hungry person than corn or wheat would, and grows in truely lousy soil. Jerusalem artichokes. Look like a field of wildflowers, very nutritious (though I personally find 2-3 a year satisfies any craving I might have for them), and absurdly easy to grow (you can just let them naturalize). And they can be left in the ground over the winter, even in the far north, and remain edible.

That sounds about right. I got just about 2 tons/acre this year. (Washington, NH)

There have been some very good points made in this thread so far. One of the most important being that you need to know how much feed you really need for the amount of animals you want to try to carry through. Another being that there is the amount and quality of feed that you need to keep animals producing or gaining weight at greatest efficiency and then there is the amount needed to keep them alive and moderately healthy until the next spring when the feed situation will ease.

At the moment my livestock is chickens. If we were to enter a time that it looked like buying feed was going to be problematic for a sustained period the first thing I'd do is start culling my flock of any but my best birds. That would cut the feed eaten every week.

Producing all of the feed my birds eat has been a project for me for a while now. Mostly scholarly, but now that I've got the garden and corn patch fenced (blasted pigs) I'm going to get back to the hands on. My plan is to run three crops a year (I'm in Florida). The first being corn, the second field peas (Southern peas) and the third being either a small grain for grain or a seed mix planted for forage. I've done the corn before and if I can do a better job of eliminating the squirrels that wrecked my last planting I'll do it again. The field peas are easy as I've been growing them all my life. It's the winter small grains and/or forage that will be new. This weekend I'll be sowing a deer plot seed mix that is a blend of wheat, oats, and rye varieties that are known to do well in Florida. I'll be mixing in a pound of broadleaf mustard in as well since my birds like it right well. I've put some research into this and believe it's going to work, but of course that's theory so we'll see what reality turns out to be.

For you folks in Florida, and southern Georgia and Alabama the Florida Cooperative Extension Service has recently posted a new document that is of interest here.

Management Considerations for Wheat Production in Florida
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/AG293

Until recently the Extension Service didn't really recommend growing winter small grains for anything much other than forage, but as they state in the document with corn and other grain prices the way they are it now starts to become practical to grow your own in Florida even though we're not as well suited to it as other states. Next year I'm going to try a stand of pure soft-red wheat in addition to the stuff I plant for winter forage. If I can grow a mix of corn, wheat, field peas, green feed, and oyster shell I think I can pretty much provide 100% of my bird's feed needs. I don't think I'd like to do that all the time, but I intend to grow enough every year to at least keep my seed supply viable and in large enough quantity that I can substantially expand my plantings if I need to.

If you have a strong back you can cut enough hay for at least one cow or several goats by hand with a scythe if you just gotta. Folks did just that for centuries all the way up until the late nineteenth century. No reason we can't do it again, presuming we've got the tools.

.....Alan.

I am experimenting with several types of grain this year and next year. I'm planting small patches of wheat, amaranth, mangles, millet, spelt, oats, and white corn. My patches are only 3' x 8'. They are simply tests to find out IF I can grow them. It will be enough to give me seeds to plant again the following year. I may try some other grains next year. When I find some that grow well in my part of the country, I'll plant larger patches. My pastures will provide plenty of hay for the animals, but it may be hard to harvest it after TSHTF. I won't look forward to doing much by hand. I'm looking for a set of harness and equipment so I can use the donkeys to plow, plant, and harvest. I have a neighbor who uses his mules that way so I have someone to learn from.

With the bad drought here this summer a lot of the cattle farmers are putting in fields of fall turnips for the animals.
Shelly

Central Wyoming....we grow grass hay, alfalfa, corn, oats, and wheat to feed our own animals and ourselves

approximate Yields per acre:

grass hay - 3/4 ton (nonirrigated)
alfalfa - 3.25 ton (irrigated)
oats - 35 bushels (irrigated, not fertilized)
wheat- 55-60 (irrigated, not fertilized)
corn- mostly made into silage because it just doesn't have time to ripen or dry on the stalks

This got long winded, and though is more on genetic in the ifirst part hopefully it sparks a idea to go search out more answers.

Sustainable agriculture is a buzzword that will cross the lips of many farmers in the next few years particularly after the doughty times of this year and the previous several and the next few as well.... and no I do not believe that the algoreian theory has anything to do with the current cycle of weather patterns]

cultivation of crops since WW2 has been promoted using the petrol based fertilizers, and only recently have any commercial farmers looked into using green manure crops for betterment of the soils, and renewing the soils health to promote a sustainable way of life for them. In any given microclimate the variables are so unique that any answer given is likely to be the wrong one for somebody reading..... so any advice must be used with common [now often un-common] sense and accessing the climate in which agriculture practices are applied. Further animals today have been bred to change to the appealability of the masses for differing reasons, some of the old genetic structure has been lost in what i call chasing the trends of the marketplace dictated by someone who sits in an office and has no idea of practical growing conditions in the wide climatic variables, plants can be placed into that category as well.

One of the lost abilities that many animals have is inefficiency in growth for small holders parcels, meaning that some very large frame animals require 2- times the input product for growth to maturity than the smaller framed older genetic animals used to, we have allowed the meat packer to dictate the size of animal that was sold to slaughter and suffered for having to use more land to grow that animal into a salable product, thus if a person learns to look to the past and to the genetics of certain disappearing herds they might be able to obtain efficient animals yet, thus requiring a lesser amount of feed to sustain the grower his/her herd. Some animals can be made a little more efficient by only feeding them grass and hay, but in doing so it takes a longer time to mature, forced maturity or imagined maturity is achieved in feeding higher proteins and reducing the exercise the animal gets in obtaining that feed.... which is why you see increased feedlots having 200 steers in a pen with very little room for moving around the last 30-60 days of their life cycle.

Many folks who have horses today will lose them in hard times as they have been forced to sustain on high protein feeds, and can not acquire enough sustenance on grasses and growing legumes alone, yet if that horse is young enough they might yet save it for the horse grows to age 5 and the intestine can be stretched to utilize grasses up until about age 4-5, older animals just can not get the capacity to do much more than go downhill fast during the winter months particularly without higher protein feeds... cattle are similar, but also quit growing earlier in their life cycles, I have not had the chance and opportunity to get into the genetics fully in sheep other than a yers ago when we raised registered Suffolk nor goats at all, but they probably can be managed to accept grasses only and thrive upon it as well. Swine, which i do not eat, so have no desire to grow, can also be placed on pasture and take longer to bring to a marketable weight, but the gentic disposition of many of the swine breeds has been lost to factory farming and confinement operations......

now onto what it takes to raise and over winter an animal..... I was told growing up that one cow would run where 5 sheep or 5 goats would on pasture and that figure transfers to both dairy and beef cattle and sheep as the increased intake for dairy animals is proportionate in all three [yes there is such a practice as dairy sheep and horses, though not many outside of Tibet eve drank horse milk] Dad used to figure on our North Idaho farmstead that the cows would eat 3 ton of hay during the inter if he did not have to start feeding until Novemeber and that ran into the month of April and sometimes May so he always tried to have 4 ton on hand, and some straw as well for the colder days of winter [though straw has little food value the animals seem to did well during the coldest of weather if they ate barley straw with their hay] Dad and then I too put up hay with a small square baler keeping bales to about 60 pounds for ease of handling when feeding, when we put up hay for sale we tried to keep 80 pounds bales the standard. though 60 pound bales stacked on the truck easier and in the barn as well... a pound fed is still a pound, though if fed on the ground waste occurs greater than if feed is placed in a feed bunk, and then animals still waste feed, some more than others.

Small holders can still find machinery that is meant to be used on small acreages, though somewhat the collector and restoration craze has put those machines a little higher on the market than some folks are willing topay for older tractors, the old implements are still reasonable and can be used with newer tractors too. An old small pull type combine or even self driven can be found in workable condition and most made in the past 50 years still have parts interchangeable at the dealerships though some may be way outrageous in price tag for the reason they are rarely needed any longer.... but a small holder dont need a Gleaner with a 24 foot header for a few acres of barely, wheat or oats, and if you harvest peas or beans you need one with a pea bar and some folks used a conveyor "pickup" after putting the grain in a swath not being able to "cure on the stem" in some climates. It is sad but many of those old combines have been used in demolition contests in rural areas where such is promoted to prevent the resurgence of small farmsteads using that old machinery.... yes conspiracy is everywhere!

If a small holder wants to they can produce their own fuel to run diesel machines, but it is a costly venture to get into, mostly in time and some space, the equipment can be obtained for less than $20,000.00 and that will last several lifetimes most likely, and is also a sideline business to get into pressing oilseed for others..... the cake left over is used for animal feeds and the milk butterfat content is said to increase in the herds which feed it.

William
Central Idaho

Bump.

.....Alan.

One of the best preps you can get for a small acreage is an old horse draw sickle mower. Those things are tough as nails and can be pulled by a pair of horses or milk cows if need be or if you have gas a small heavy duty garden tractor.
These will cut a lot of hay much faster than you can with a handsickle.
many have places to attach a canvas for gathering grain bundles for threshing.

If yoyu have a team of draft horses you can use the rear end off an old tractor to drive many types of PTO equipment.
some things many just never consider but in such a case we would need to think out of the box .
One of my dream preps is a oil press and replacing the tractors on our place with diesels . being able to produce bio diesel would be a major advantage and allow for farming more ground . the bean or corn meal left after pressing can still provide animal feed .
Why give up technology when we have ways to use it to our advantage .

I'm using a pig tractor to clear the ground of bermuda grass so I can plant a big patch of corn, beans and squash this year. At this point the pigs are getting most of their nutrition from the grass rhizomes they dig up. When they are done, I will have a tilled and weeded garden and plenty of meat for the freezer. Win/win!

My 5 chickens eat perhaps 50 pounds of feed per month. Right now, it is better for me to raise vegetables but if it hit the fan I would raise mostly grain.

If I were to assume 30 bushels per acre, that would mean I would need 2/5 of an acre for my layer chickens. I might be able to cut that down by free-ranging them to hunt for bugs, in which case the grain they did not need would go to us.

Corn is less nutritious, but it yields better. Unfertilized corn MIGHT yield 50 bushels per acre, which means with bugs and scraps I MIGHT get it down to 1/5 an acre to provide for the chickens.

If it gets really bad, why waste good feed on livestock?

Its a lot easier to grow a half a ton of food for yourself for a season.

For me it boils down to living rather than simply surviving.
I have no intention of loosing all my modern conveniences , I like electric lights and freezers and plan to keep them running. I also enjoy the tracter and combine if that means I need to plant 8 acres to produce the fuel so I can farm 22 more so be it , with the tractor I can farm that 30 acres much easier than someone trying to do an acre of garden by hand

But lambs taste better than the tons of weeds they can eat, and I dont really have to "grow" anything most of the year for them

You cant grow eggs or milk either. If you want to be a Vegan thats fine, but I prefer meat and dairy products myself, and you cant have those without livestock. Plus livestock can provide "HORSE power"

this is where having many hands to help with the work comes in. those people that most of you say you'll shoot if they come near? put them to work mowing hay, hoeing the crops, gathering firewood, cutting trees down for building. if they don't work, throw them out. you're the boss. things get done YOUR way. I personally would like having more folks around that I can trust. more eyes to keep watch for predators. even if your family is bumbling ideates that don't know the difference between a corn stalk and carrot, they can be taught. till then, use them for grunt work like cleaning out the barn. lol.

-Melissa

I have thought on this.

If I grow the grain and it is not enough for the chickens AND us, then I will eat the chickens. If there IS enough for the chickens AND us, then I will eat the eggs.

Either option sounds more interesting than a vegetarian diet!

Bump.

.....Alan.

Alan, when you say "forage" does that mean you plant it and let the chickens just eat it where it is without harvesting?

We are in a big wheat producing area, so I know it grows well here. Could a person dedicate a 1/4 acre to wheat and just let it sit and "re-plant" itself every year? I guess what I'm asking is would what the chickens didn't eat reproduce on its own?

I think you will find that the chickens will do a very efficient job of harvesting nearly every last grain of wheat, if allowed to free-range in the stand of wheat. IMO, you would be better off to harvest the wheat and replant what you need to grow the next year's crop, and keep the chickens OUT. If the grain is kept from birds (domestic or wild), the seed heads would drop to the ground and re-seed like any other grass, but you would not have the control over where it sprouted, giving you thick and thin patches. Also, unless you are planting GMO wheat and using Round-Up to kill the weeds, they can eventually crowd out your wheat, or at the very least, make it more difficult to harvest and clean.

I grew a small plot of wheat in my main garden this past year - just as an experiment. I planted the seed (hard red winter wheat) in late October, IIRC, and it grew wheat grass all winter. I do allow the chickens to free range a bit when the garden is fallow, so they did keep the wheat grass mowed for me. In the spring, after the chickens were confined to their own run, the wheat took off and grew, giving me a decent harvest in July. I'll be planting wheat, barley, naked (or hulless) oats and regular oats for harvest in 2010 - wheat and barley this fall, the oats in the spring.

A few things I learned from this experiment - for home use, it would be more efficient for me to plant the grains in wide rows, with soaker hoses running through each row and paths for me to walk through and weed the grain (weeds going to the chickens or goats). As I garden organically, it was difficult to get into the plot to weed, and using sprinklers to irrigate is wasteful of water. Plant your seed more thickly than you think you'll really need, and cover it with a scattering of straw to keep it from the crows until it is established - I lost a lot of seed to crows and other birds. Don't add more seed in the spring if you see bare patches in your plot - it doesn't mature at the same time as the fall planted wheat, and the yield is very poor in comparison. Make sure that when you plant whole wheat from the feed store, it really is whole WHEAT, not mixed with barley seed! I had to sort every stalk by hand to get wheat for baking and barley for soup (and pure seed for this fall) - on the other hand, I now have organic wheat AND barley seed to plant. :) Co-planting carrots with the wheat didn't work - the carrots didn't germinate...not sure if it was the mixed planting or the seed, as I generally did not have a good carrot year. Planting the wheat where the potato patch had been worked out fine - the volunteer potato plants didn't seem to affect the wheat, and I'll have a few more pounds of taters than I would otherwise have had.

I toss out older veggies to my chickens. I notice that they have to beat my calves to it though. The calves love tomatoes and sliced cucumbers.

I have enough wheat stored that I am sure I can keep my chickens alive. The calves might have to live on hay through the winter - no grain. We would hate to do it, but we could hand harvest hay and put it in tightly packed stacks - feeding it as needed.

Another thing we have thought about - keeping the pastures we have now in top condition so they can go longer without intervention. We are looking for the longest-living grasses and legumes also.

Yes, let the chickens harvest it.

Here's a photo of that experiment:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2088/...328352f01f.jpg

That is a bag of game plot mix, a bag of whole oats that I use for feed, and a pound of mustard seed. I tilled it up, broadcast the mixed seed using my lawn fertilizer, then covered it pulling a board behind the riding mower but I could have done it by hand just as well. It was a drought year that year so I had to irrigate until the stand was established. This year we got enough rain I wouldn't have needed to do that.

I won't bother with the game plot mix any more. I've since discovered that ordinary feed oats sprout well enough to get the job done and a few handfuls of mustard or turnip seeds mixed in (fairly cheap in bulk at the farm supply). Possibly I might mix some rye in (grass or grain) if it looks like we might get really low temperatures that year. I don't have enough experience growing grain wheat to say, but I'm sure we've got some folks like DaleK and others who could advise as to how well that would work.

.....Alan.

Thanks for the replies.

Our chickens (all layers) free-range, so in the spring, summer and most of the fall they have green grass (a large lawn with no fertilizer or herbicides used and pasture ground with grass and alfalfa), bugs and wheat supplement. If I grew my own wheat for winter use, I'd have to keep the chickens out.

I was kind of thinking of a "no work" method of providing a food source during winter. Like maybe something seed bearing that would grow and die off in the winter, but leaving enough for them to forage on their own. Is there anything like that out there?

I did find where someone uses their greenhouse in the winter to grow forage crops and raise worms for their chickens. It looked interesting but of course would be work. Not that I am lazy; just want to work smarter not harder. :)