feeding stock beets?

Randel,

Mighty fine idea to use root crops for stock feed. I got started doing this many millennia ago when I was in college. Driving home (to the homestead) from university during harvest season was a frequent stop event to pick up the sugar beets fallen off the trucks. Chopped 'em up with an axe and fed 'em to the hogs. They disappeared so fast I couldn't keep up.

When they could the goats would steal some from the pig bucket and snarf 'em up. It got so I quit buying corn or COB and started growing roots. But then I also had a "relationship" with a couple of Taco Bell's. I figured three pigs per Taco Bell...fed 'em out just fine.

You're right that they store well...set up some space in your root cellar...or build one. Gosh, isn't that part or most of the reason for a root cellar? You stock will like it just fine.

Big Rockpile, I think you are like me...so old you can't remember a childhood. Who are you kidding besides yourself? LOL

bearkiller

Unregistered said:

Sounds like a good bet for feed- much more reliable than growing hay and like you said the storage would be sooo much easier.

Click to expand...

????? I would have to disgree with the storage & reliable part. We farmers get paid very little for what we produce. Everyone wants cheap food, or import cheaper stuff from South America.... So we basically need to feed our livestock the cheapest & most reliable stuff we can.

Dry hay will store for a decade in a barn. You get 2-5 cuttings a year on hay, so if one cutting is small or too wet, at least you have multiple chances to get a good crop. Almost nothing outyields alfalfa for protien tonnage per acre.

Root crops are great, I don't want to discourage you from experimenting. However, you need to seed every year, you need to dig them up & knock the dirt off & store them in a cool dry place & they will go bad & at 70+ % moisture you need a lot more room than to store the same feed value of 18% moisture dry alfalfa. Also some livestock needs at least some long-stem roughage; using only soft foods like beets is hard on them - I'm not so familar with your size livestock. You will only be getting the root, wasiting the tops? They grow a lot of sugar beets north of me, and the disease problems that build up in the soil is really bad, they need to spray 3-10 times to fight the fungus & such.

I do grow 5 acres of turnips every year for my cattle to graze on. I think many of the crops you have suggested would make good grazing crops, and rely on hay over the winter. It makes a lot more ecconomic sense.

For the turnips, I plant oats, turnips, & red clover in early spring. I harvest the oats for grain, bale the straw, let the 'blow over' oats regrow along with the turnips & clover for a few weeks, and turn the cattle into it so they can harvest it. In late fall I plow it under, so I gain a bit of fertilizer from the clover & manure. Really use that land! And it is ready to graze about the time the pastures go dormant in the heat of summer.

This is not the _ideal_ way to handle the turnips, I end up cutting a lot of greens off with harvesting the oats. But I feel the multiple use works out better. The cattle get a variaty of stuff to graze to get their nutrition. They can eat the turnip leaves as well as the root. I do have to be careful about bloat with the clover in the mix, but as long as it is under 40% of the green stuff they eat & I manage it properly, works well.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud, for me in my area. Different ideas work too, and different climates often are very different & require different management.

--->Paul

(Boy the log-on of this site is bad, this is the third time I've written this, it never knows who I am....)