A Midwest Journal

Haven’t talked about my Missouri grass-fed beef cattle in awhile, so I stacked up some ideas meanwhile – and so I blog now:

We’re still on how to make more profit raising beef cattle, which is the first reason I’m researching mob grazing. There are other apparent benefits (such as being more environmentally responsible), but that will come later.

Milo as standing winter feed instead or hay or stockpiled grass

This year’s experiment in lowering input costs has been to raise milo (the idea from a local farmer, Harry Cope) so the cattle would eat it instead of having to feed hay this winter. I got it into the ground a bit too late, so I’m now just hoping for a very long fall before the first killing frost (3 nights of below 22 degrees) and so allow it to make seed heads. Now, a recent post over at Yahoo Groups – GrassFed Beef gave me pause, but a later post there gave me more ideas.

First, if you’re feeding grain to animals, it messes with their digestion and throws off their Omega3/6 ratios. So it’s fine to feed corn as a grass, but not the seed heads (corn cobs) it produces. (That’s from a purist standpoint. Factually, they love corn like candy. So IMHO, corn-cob chunks are a good training treat, but not good as a diet.) So trying to grow milo and feed them the grain head in winter is counter productive to making high quality beef.

Second, it still cost me to put that milo in – but probably a fifth what the same ground would produce in terms of the cost of putting hay up. So it’s still cheaper – and the experiment hasn’t run its course yet. If seeding it so late that it doesn’t really get properly developed seed head still leaves a lot of stalks standing above the ice and snow, it’s probably a decent investment and cost-saving production.

You either have to stockpile grass, or feed hay. Growing milo as as a stockpiled grass source is cheaper than hay, but not as cheap as stockpiled perennial grass.

Now, I started a couple years ago putting hay out on a field, staggered, so I didn’t have manure accumulating in one spot (as well as the mess and expense of firing up the tractor and driving through mud to deliver bales. Last winter, I got the tractor out once – and that was to pick up bales that weren’t going to be eaten that winter.

My approach with this was to put those bales on a nearby crop ground (right next door, across the fence) and put that on the poorest soil, where big sections of the topsoil had essentially been removed by earlier farming (erosion). The trick was that with all that manure and old hay left there, it was either feast or famine. Didn’t disk up very well and didn’t take planting well, either. It took most of the next summer to really digest, and when I did get something planted in it, it took off like all thunder – lots higher than anything around. Or it just sat there, waterlogged. Got the original idea from one old boy who fed round bales without bale rings to his Auxvasse Missouri Longhorns for several years on the top of one worn-out hillock and wound up with a very lush pasture out of it.

But really, that area isn’t a high producing section anyway, so I’m not losing much, I figure.

Hay as fertilizer for worn out crop ground

There was a thread on that forum lately about buying hay as fertilizer, which got me thinking. Yes, it’s cheaper to buy hay than make it. The trick is in how you feed it. Setting it up as big round bales isn’t all that efficient, as you still wind up with concentrated circles of manure, and a center with old hay. (Now the cows and calves love to lie on this when they’re eating the next bale over, so it gets some layers mixed…) But overall, it’s not all that efficient.

I did unroll a bale once down a hill and saw how they went through it. Since it was on a pasture, they ate most all of it and it wasn’t showing the next spring.The trick, with feeding anything in winter, is that the ice and snow cover it. That is where the big bales (or even small square bales thrown out on top of the snow) are easier for cattle to feed.

Some people actually advise growing your fall pastures up tall and then cutting and winnowing that grass so that it is in long, high rows so the cattle can then be strip-grazed on it (they’d waste it by tromping and laying on it if you feed too much at once).

For that poor crops ground above, here’s the next idea: Unroll that hay in contours across the land, so it will catch runoff. But use the rake to pile it back up in windrows. Then feed it that way to the cattle, with the electric fence running perpendicular to the rows, which keeps them eating only as much as they need. No more moving frozen-down hay rings or cold-to-start tractors. Plus, the ground is in better shape to try to crop it next spring. At least that’s the theory.

I’ll try this theory on the milo ground which didn’t produce well (same areas that don’t have any real topsoil.)

Just another idea until I can perfect my managed grazing to the point where I have the nice electric fences all over and can easily move my cattle every day.

Meanwhile, you farm with what you got.

Research on mob grazing continues – to make profitable grass-fed beef cattle.

Next up is to figure how to do the transition from conventional grazing over to managed grazing and then to mob grazing. First situation is both existing fences and water supply. Existing fences are built for rotating pastures when they eat everything off – conventional grazing. They aren’t set so that I can partition them easily with portable electric fences. So I’ve got some engineering to do.

My approach is as I’d been advised, to start partitioning pastures for a few years and see where you are using the temporary fences – and then put a permanent electric fence there so you can set up temporary ones which use that as a power source. So you aren’t hooking up and taking down a battery and charger every time you move the fence (current arrangement.) Means the cows don’t get moved as much as they should. (You can get around this by pivoting off a corner and giving a new pie slice each time, but there’s no back-fence which some prefer for mob grazing so what was just grazed gets to rest and re-grow.)

So I’m studying my existing fences and how I use them to see ways I could set up something that allows more mobile set up and breakdown. (Plus rig the permanent fences so the cattle will keep them cleaned up with no brush growing over them.)

This winter, at least, I’ve got a sizable set of stockpiled grass from our too-wet summer – so I can see how this does over winter.

Plenty to do with what I’ve got to work with. Always got to like having options…

The goal is to knock out cost of winter feeding and to increase the quality of forage I already have. Both will increase my profits for finishing beef cattle on pasture only.

- – - -

Update: While I was doing further research on mob grazing and grass fed beef, I found this story from Eat, Drink, Better. Seems that some of these big packers haven’t been able to keep their beef clean enough from the manure they raise it in. That’s the problem with grain-fed beef, that they simply raise these cattle in their own manure. And keeping the meat from being infected becomes a real problem. Because bacteria is native to manure. Plus that particular strain of e coli is more prevalent in feedlots than pastures.

More later – my research on this is  continuing…

Waking early the other day, I was taking the extra time to just consider recent events and resolve my day’s plans before I headed into them.

The oddest thing occurred to me – do we own ourselves, really?

(Warning – standby – rant alert.)

Here’s some points that have come across my lines recently:

• Government seems to be taking a larger run out of our lives (like enforcing healthcare choices), whether we want it to or not.
• Congress and elected officials seem to be listening to lobbyists and party officals more than the voters who elected them.
• Our food has increasingly had to be shipped in from thousands of miles away instead of being grown where we can ask and find out what went into it.
• We are being discouraged from working and being independent, since if we did make a fortune to retire on, we’d have it all taxed away – but people who never earn enough to pay taxes are given money from those who do.
• Various scams abound, from credit card companies and usury-level charges along with extraneous fees, to career politicians with their perks, to interest groups who are taking government money (ours) and being paid to promote some extremist agenda, to “Humane Societies” who aren’t trying to handle excess dogs and cats, but are rather trying to make us all into vegans by driving our farmers out of business with regulations.
• Our state-run, mainstream media won’t report on public demonstrations with more people attending than the President’s inauguration, but will tell us about a flu which is less harmful than the regular one – and that we should all line up and pay for shots to protect ourselves against this fiction.
• While the earth has been growing colder since the late 1990’s, our pollution has been growing greater but the only solutions is to what: raise taxes and cost of living for everyone.

So it seemed to me that we needed to stop and take all this into account and see what we could actually do about it.

Of course, the bulk of the problems above really deal with government issues – we are trusting an unresponsive, lobbyist infected government to handle situations we could and should handle ourselves.

Let’s look at some simple solutions to these:

1. People have stayed healthy for many more years than there have ever been insurance companies. And some of the cheapest health care right now has been started in some states where you pay a monthly fee directly to the doctors’ office in order to keep you well – not just when you are sick. No middleman – no one betting against your survival – no one saying you now can’t get any further treatment. And guess what – it’s cheaper by more than half.

2. Career politicians (and career government workers) are really a self-perpetuating business all by themselves. According to the Golden Rule, you have to give before you can get. But government has to take before it can give. And do you know who is writing all these bills that the Congressmen don’t have time to read? Lobbyists and professional government clerical workers – neither of which are elected, both protected from being fired for incompetence. Politicians only want to be re-elected so they can get the perks they voted in for themselves. They live in a different world and even if convicted still get a posh annual retirement income of hundreds of thousands each year – while they are in prison.

3. While there is all these complaints of Cargill, ADM, and Tyson controlling our food chain – no one is telling the stories about how community gardens have been springing up on empty lots inside our cities, as well as on rooftops. Where people are contributing their own labor and getting – literally – the fruits of their endeavors. There is the movement of locally-grown food, some call it the 100-mile diet, getting your food from within a hundred-mile radius of where you live. That way you could know what was in it and maybe even lend a hand in raising it, if you wanted.

4. Taxes have less and less to do with supporting the common good, and more for supporting the friends of whoever is in power in government. (Look at where those “stimulus” funds are actually going to…) Factually, if you take the recommendations given by the IRS guidelines, the most inexpensive way to work is for yourself as a corporate entity and increasingly resorting to barter of your business goods. That is the least-taxed method of making a viable living these days.

5. It looks like all the biggest scams are government sponsored or sanctioned. Credit card companies used to be regulated by the states and had to keep their interest fees low until the Feds in their “OCC” elected to take this right away from the States – and credit fees doubled, to nearly 1/3rd of the original loan. The Humane Society of the United States is actually anti-pet and anti-breeder and anti-farmer. Anything that has four-legs and reproduces is under their auspice – and is getting laws passed to make it more difficult to have pets or eat meat. Yet is runs no animal shelters – and had closed many down, destroying all their occupants. They are a special interest in Washington and do nothing humane. But government scams abound – since the government has a monopoly, who can stop them?

6. Our media has never been accurate in its whole history. They have always, always written sensationalist stories to sell advertising space. Any idea of “Journalist Ethics” was invented by Academics in order to sell classes for journalist wannabe’s. And when they lose their joint control of the air waves to cable and the Internet, they complain about how these “aren’t really journalists” – thank Gawd – and continue to pander to various government officials for “scoops”. The mainstream media has never, ever reflected the real world. Their soap opera’s actually get the closest, way more than their “reality” shows. (Who eat bugs in the jungle for a living?)

7. Read the actual NASA reports and you’ll see the global warming issue is a hoax. Warmest year on record was about 1998, last two years we have had record snowfalls and cold internationally, this summer was one of the coolest on record in decades for many states. Who started this rumor? A career politician. But is CO2 rising? Yes. Effect on global temperature – nothing. Our problem with CO2 starts with our governments, which expel this by the megaton every year and have nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, we truck our food in from thousands of miles away with all that exhaust and refuse permits to set up windfarms off some politicians’ East Coast homes. (Because they are unsightly?) Solutions to this fictional global warming are to tell polluting companies they have to buy credits from less-polluting companies. But the states with politicians in charge get more credits assigned to those states – instead of states with huge forests and pastures filled with grazing animals. (Oh, finally tracked down that other fiction. Excess cow flatulence is caused by feeding them corn and other grains, not their natural diet of grass – which most cattle are raised on for the bulk of their lives.)

- – - -

OK, take a breath, slow down.

The world isn’t all bad. Nor is it all that bad.

But the question comes back – Who Owns You? Or — Do You Really Own Yourself?

Consider this – if you own property and don’t pay the taxes on it, what happens? Some government employees are able to come in and seize your properties for the back taxes with guns and put you in prison if you resist. If you use a gun to defend your property, they are able to use lethal force (kill you) in their “defense”. And your relatives probably can’t even sue for “wrongful death”.

However, if you don’t make enough money to pay taxes because you don’t work, then you qualify for the government renting a house on your behalf and even giving you all sorts of handouts. Who pays for these? Oh, they tell some people who do work for a living to cough up – or they will come and take it, this all backed by gun-toting government employees, against which you can’t defend yourself.

Now if your property is owned by a corporation that you run, the taxes are much less and if it’s a non-profit, you might not pay taxes at all. Similarly, if you don’t really work for a living on anyone’s paper, and barter for everything you own, your taxes are very low, if not non-existent. But you do work for a living and control your own property – and don’t pay for someone else’s upkeep.

Can you control government? No.

Can you improve the government you have? Yes.

Solutions you can do to own yourself

• Let’s do one thing – make all government employees (including the elected ones) all term limited. States can do this for their own Senators and Representatives, they don’t have to get a Federal law passed (which will never happen).
• Another thing: educate yourself on taxes and learn to avoid high taxes by being smart. Only the dumb rich are taxed. Only dumb governments tax the dumb rich enough to make them move to lower-tax states. (Ask New York and California how this works. Both are failed experiments.)
• Vote your representatives out of office on a regular basis, otherwise. Let someone else have a chance.
  How about sunset provisions in every law, including the ones which have been on the books forever? This would mean government officials have to re-vote in all laws every few years to keep them on the books. (Like the Civil Rights Act, which is now being used to protect White minority voters.)
• Get your food all locally. Help grow it yourself to keep your costs down.
• How about insisting your city start recycling materials (they can actually sell the metal and plastic today, while organic materials can be composted back into – yes – local city gardens, or parks, or local farms. (Why does NYC keep dumping it into the ocean – isn’t that just more pollution?) And so we won’t have to spend all that fuel and CO2 trucking, training, and shipping food from California to NY, or Florida to California, or Arkansas to Alaska…
• Quit watching TV. Period. Rots your brain.
• Cut off your power usage by unplugging anything that doesn’t have to be on (like a refrigerator). See if you can’t get a solar cell to run some devices (like night lights). Figure out how you could have the same quality of living without extra doo-dads that someone sold you during a TV infomercial…

Those are just some of the ideas I’ve had for your to reclaim your life for yourself.

You can own yourself.

It will take some work.

But the more you can limit government and work it out for yourself – or in cooperation with your neighbors – then the saner life we can all have.

Try it.

Go ahead – leave your comments below. Agree? Disagree? Could care less?

Having some fun just living life. Things are starting to work out.

I was listening to an MP3 from Greg Habstritt at Finer Minds, who mentioned that phrase above, ” You have to eat your own cooking and drink your own Kool-Aid.” So I thought to share what I’ve accumulated and been practicing.

Just returned from an all-day farm tour yesterday, and this is a partial debrief from this. I was there to study grass fed beef in southern Missouri farms (although we also saw plenty of grain fed beef as well – just no organic stuff.)

First, my lifestyle choice has been to live on a farm and work it while I got my online business operating and producing income.

Let’s review that farm first. (Now, the below figures are based on my own experience on my own farm – your mileage may vary, go ahead and see if you make make yours more profitable…)

My Dad was ailing and my life in California under a corporate cult (most are, actually) was miserable. So I left everything I had established over 20+ years and moved back to Missouri. Call it a mid-life crisis resolution or whatever – it simply made sense, though I had no savings, retirement, insurance – anything people would call security.

The farm  was mixed row-crops and cow-calf finishing operation.  And it wasn’t really sustainable. The farm was supplemented by my Dad’s pension. When he passed, my Mother paid off the bills with his life insurance (which is what that is actually for) and then started running the farm based on her pension plus what we made the farm produce.

The grain crops, if we made anything, pretty much ate up any profits in equipment, fuel, seed, and fertilizer costs. The time I spent on the tractor was discounted (free) as the farm costs paid my room and board. Theoretically, anyway.

The cow-calf operation theoretically made about $4,000 per year, based on 20 calves being backgrounded. This was after the feed bill. Now I was able to increase that to $5K by selling them as feeders (right after they were weaned) and not having to grind, mix, or buy feed. Vet bills for the occasional sick steer also dropped. That feed lot started producing forage again.

But $4K for a 250 acre farm wasn’t really sustainable, since we had electricity, water, taxes, etc. Still basically running on my Mother’s pension and savings. (The government started making her take out certain amounts of her savings after she go so old… Thanks a lot.)

My own ideas were to make a living, home-based on my online business activities. So farming hours were slotted out, and the rest of the day was my own to invest. No wife or kids of my own, so I could simply throw everything at that. (But let’s not digress — back to the farm.)

Grain crops gave some profit, but it took all summer to produce. And was the most variable based on weather.

While this may seem non-sequitur, the two crops that are the easiest to raise on our land are grass and trees. Very little inputs, but harvesting eats up your profits. Usually, it costs more to bale hay than you can buy it for. And trees take longer to grow, such that you can only sell a tree after 50 years, usually.  Doesn’t pay enough in that one sale to pay someone to grow them.

The best harvester for grass and trees is a natural one: cows (or sheep and goats, or a combination or two or three of those.)

Reason being is that grass grows better in partial shade and cows will eat more grass in the shade than in the sun. Cows eat grass and turn it into meat. Meanwhile, they’ll trim the trees within reach and keep down the competition of new sprouts (mostly) by stripping off their leaves (it helps de-worm the cattle.)

Cows take about two years to grow on just grass.

And if you generally leave them alone to fatten on grass, they do fine. Better than fine, actually: beef which is pasture finished is lower fat, lower cholesterol, higher omega-3 & -6 – so is generally considered “heart-healthy”. So it’s better for you to eat.

Meanwhile, cows deposit their manure (and urine) on the grass and under the trees to fertilize them. The trick is to manage your herd so that they spread their wealth more widely – as they tend to rest under trees and deposit there when they get up, just before they go out to eat again.  You want trees in your pastures, spread out so that there is probably a 50/50 mix of sunny and shady grass at most times. And move your cows regularly so that they let the grass grow back.

(This author continues telling how he brilliantly rescues a small farm and returns it to sustainable profitability overnight – well, at least he sees the light after 8 years of hard work… See Part 2)

Photo: eschipul

How you or anyone plugs into this Universe around us has mostly been ignored by our educators, our governments, and our authorities. 

So most people don’t know how to go about it – although if you read the popular literature, you’ll see that a lot of people are looking and a great deal almost have it figured out almost or completely.

A friend’s conversation brought this up – you see, we are all connected and interconnected through our intuition. 

(Gasp, shudder – no, really?) Well, most people don’t have that reaction, because they actually suspected it for some time. A lot of people call it common sense, which might or might not be the best label to put on it (but government actions have pretty routinely shown that this substance is lacking in many, many people we elected.)

By whatever name you give it, it’s still the same quantity of stuff. 

Boil down all the hints, sudden inspirations, odd notions, genius ideas that you have had – along with all the poo-pooed “psychic phenonmenon” which all of us have experienced form time to time – and you’ll see that they all fit under this single name of intution. 

This is the single channel where we talk to the Universe and it talks to us.  

Now, let’s leave the concept of “God” out of this picture, since that is a personal thing to every individual, and just take this as a rational view of things – something anyone and everyone can apply without limit. 

Consider that the world around you is interconnected in every way possible. Scientists can’t explain it, other than in pieces,  but you and I know that this is true – just look at gardens, weather, gravitation, all these things. In Nature, everything works together. Where there is an excess of anything or a deficit, Nature (when left to it’s own devices) will adjust and transform those areas and bring new life – and even new life forms – into that area.  Eroded hillsides become populated with growing things again. Volcanic activity destroys everything for awhile, but then becomes some of the most lush and fertile areas. Glaciers wiped everything out, but then eventually left and we inherited incredibly rich topsoil. 

And the whole point of organic gardening is to simply figure out how to utilize the natural processes of growing things in order to raise any desired crop.

These same principles can be applied to raising a better humankind-type of crop. People get along pretty well overall. Some individuals (tyrants) can make living pretty harsh, and we haven’t yet figured out a really, really good government system (if it’s at all possible). 

I say to you that if people would spend more time paying attention to their intuition as to things surrounding them, they would come up with better solutions for their problems and situation they are facing.

Because we are all connected, as the ancient Polynesians would tell us. 

Any farmer or gardener would hold that to be true as self-evident. And almost everyone else would also agree with this. 

So the great collective of this – called the Universe – is actually a great interconnected grid of give and take that runs through all of us.  We each are contributing to this overall scene with every thought we make and every action we take. We are all tied together this way. 

Now, what a great deal of people don’t get is that we are also able to take away as well as give. Now, you don’t really take without giving, and what  you take doesn’t stay with you. Money (that great man-made fiction) can’t be put into a great bank in the sky or underground and personally owned forever. It’s just a symbol for how well we are doing at helping others and how much we are giving and contributing to others and the world around us. 

But you can ask and recieve. It comes back to you as inspired thought, sudden insight, or – intuition.

How well your intution works depends on how much you practice listening to it and being open to those thoughts. Historically, people who have known this have been called shamans, mystics, (and worse). But the people who respected them knew they could get insight others missed. And those who derided them were mostly jealous and whistling past the graveyard.

Of course, this is simply a post to tell you that this stuff exists. You will either agree or disagree with this wholly or in part. Doesn’t matter. Because there is this one lesson that is written in every religion and every philosophy on this planet – and below are some of the phrases which describe it:

You can’t get without giving.

As you give you will recieve.

Everything comes to those who wait.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Seek and ye shall find.

The world is what you think it is.

We become what we think about.

And you see a lot of these are from the New Testament – but that’s more likely my own Western upbringing rather than any particular endorsement.

Intuition depends on how well you participate and give to the world around you. And how much you pay attention to the thoughts you recieve. The more you give, the more you are willing to recieve, the greater your intution – or the more inspired or “genius” you become. 

Too simple. Right in front of you all the time. Just as you suspected.

And you’re welcome.

iLoveButter

This is pretty close to what it looks like around here this time of year. Our red house sits on a hill surrounded by pastures and trees remarkably similar to the above. Have to post a picture sometime…

Pardon my stream-of-consciousness writing tonight, but I’ve spent the last two days getting all my spring planting done and I have a need to relax. 

Rains have been late easing off this year, which has made it virtually impossible to get any corn in. While I have about 3 acres, which will be a corn maze and also chicken feed and cow treats for the rest of the year, usually I have about 20 acres total in corn. Last year’s crop was a failure, but fattened the cows nicely and saved having to feed hay until the after the snow fell. (We have about two weeks of really miserable weather from about Dec 15 on – but it’s almost never a white Christmas.) 

My studies down this line have been to improve my cattle grazing (our most profitable crop, actually – grass-raised cattle have very low overhead; it’s the corn finishing which takes the profit out.) The trisk is to lower costs and improve the quality of feed by having the cattle forage all winter instead of feeding hay. Simple to say, but it takes some logistics. And I am fast approaching haying season, with all of it’s logistics and timing – so comparing notes about how to get by with less hay is always a tempting distraction.

Yesterday and today, I spend in disking, fertilizing, and planting. One small field (about 3 acres) went to cowpeas and sunflowers. This is a summer grazing extension – to make our pastures last longer. This will then be planted in July with my second over-wintering crop – milo. Planted too late to fully mature for a harvest, it will still be green when the frost kills it in October – and then I’ll feed it stalks and all in December then ice and snow is on everything else.

Another field was cultivated and set to corn – another 3 acres. Because it was too close to a flood area (which the green lobby has gotten Congress to call “wetlands”) where the creek gets out – and so is too wet right now to plant. I’ve got rye growing there, which also holds the moiture and keeps the ground soft. So looks like I’m going to have some rye grain crop and some rye straw bales – then cut the clover I’ve got growing with it so that we have some hay later in July off that same ground. (Love to get two crops off one planting…) 

Nearby, I have some wheat growing – and the clover is taller than it is in some areas. Great year for clover – cool and wet. End of June I’ll have that wheat, which gives me a partial chicken ration (corn and a commercial mix are the other two thirds – whole corn ground with the cob). What we don’t need is sold on the commodity lines and usually pays the cost of putting in the wheat and clover.

Just finalized a two-year rotation for that corn-maze ground: Corn  (which is harvested after the maze too late for a cover crop) is then followed by oats and clover, frost seeded. That gives me a hay crop when the oats is headed out – which, along with the clover and corn stubble, the cows love dearly.  Now, I have the option of disking that ground up in September and seeding rye (a once-over disking, so I keep the clover) – I just have to be able to mow the rye down before I plant corn – which is sometimes iffy if the rain keeps the ground too saturated to put a tractor on it. Corn one year, hay the next.  Costs are only in planting, fertilizing, and spraying the corn. I used bin-run oats (not certified seed) and the least expensive red clover I can find.

The rest of my crop ground (except for wet years like last one and this) are in a three-year rotation: 

1. Winter Peas and barley, harvested by cattle, followed by corn. 
2. Rye after corn, also harvested by cattle – which goes into soybeans.
3. Wheat with clover after soybeans – and then back to Winter peas and barley.

Advantages of this:

• the winter peas leave nitrogen for corn (as does the clover). Cuts down on nitrogen required for corn. (This will be our first year trials.)
• barley has similar feed value to corn. Eating it with the stem is more nutritious, plus harvested barley usually has to be ground and mixed with other grains to make a cattle ration. 
• Winter Peas also make meat more tender. (Note to self: get our own steer fat enough by April/May to send to butcher.)
• Rye sprouts at 39°, so it up and ready to eat before the grass is ready on the pastures.  Probable sequence is to eat down the rye from mid-March to early/mid-April – then switch to winter peas and barley until mid May – then back to rye until late May.  This saves our pastures to get lush growth on them and allows us to keep the bull away from our cows until about mid-May, meaning we have March and April calves – which are born on grass, not snow.
• Rye (and all these cover crops) tend to suppress other weeds which need to sprout in Spring from seeds left the year before. So we have less weeds and as we harvest with cows, then all the weeds we do get become forage – a nice clover salad.
• Cover crops give a forage crop as well as seed. I keep a small acreage (the best) back and harvest that for seed for the following year. Wheat gives a triple crop: grain, straw, and then about a month later – clover-stubble hay. 

Ideally, we’d get away from spraying at all. Corn and soybeans are the only plants right now that does better at all with spraying.  Mainly because they have longer growing seasons that many weeds can mature and go to seed in amongst it – like cockleburr.  Rye before corn or soybeans does a good job of suppressing weeds. One plant-doctor told me that corn takes a little hit from rye, as it is basically a grass. But if that’s the cost of not having to spray, it’s a lot cheaper.  I really want to get away from corn and soybeans altogether. But they are cash crops which give us (usually) some cash income faster than cattle.

The combination plantings we do tend to both utilize the nutrients better. Most of the corn fertilizer is not well utilized. Soybeans can glean everything they need in following corn, especially when following a cover crop which doesn’t allow the fertilizer to leach away. Wheat with no fertilizer is possible right after soybeans, as it can take the residual N and do OK. I like to spread my wheat broadcast with the clover from the fertilizer buggy – but keep the fertilizer down to minimums. And use their buggy to do my planting. One less trip over the soil. Have to use slightly more seed, but it comes up thick and I don’t have to spray as some do with their planted wheat. Clover fills the gap between wheat and also possibly supplies some N as well. 

I’d rather get away from corn. Margins are just too high, so any poor performance and the crop doesn’t pay for itself. From 20 cows I get 20 calves every year (mostly) and so get about $5-600 profit per steer. Some years, I get $1,000 profit from corn after all the input costs are subtracted. That and the low time-input costs of raising cattle are pushing me toward getting out of grain crops altogether – but when I use cows to harvest the cover crops, I’m getting additional pre-digested nutrients spread in those areas, which then lowers grain input costs.

And so I’m working up a method which is unknown by the extension specialists I consult – some sort of whole-farm integrated holistic approach. Some trials of it this year have proved the initial approach is sound. 

Essentially, in using my cows to graze ahead of spring planting, I then keep all the nutrients out in the fields, deposited in a way which is more readily accepted by the next plant crop. Cows do not over-graze their pastures in the spring, which allows a luxuriant growth before they touch them.

Also, where I can, I then plant crops using no fertilizer and inexpensive seed, which keeps weed populations in check while I build organic matter in these soils.  I am using my crops to feed cattle as forage, not as grain. And using my cattle to raise my crops. Four-hooved combination combine-aerator-fertilizer-mobile storage units. Which replace themselves every year.

While this essay doesn’t approach organizing this data into usable format, you can glean the principles as I ramble down below. Factually, I haven’t boiled them down for myself as to goals and priorities. I only know that I want to lower my inputs and improve the soil. Integrating cattle and cover crops into my regular cash-cropping systems then also gives me improved cattle and soil-health simultaneously. 

Corn (whole corn on the ear, not shelled) is prefered by cattle and their handlers. Because of that cob, a cow can’t founder (bloat), no matter how much you feed them. So it’s a great treat, which then keeps them loyal to you and allows you to get close and check how they are doing on an individual basis. Also, a bucket of corn will call them out of the woods or pasture so you can do a head count and see which one the bull is following (so you know when to expect a calf from her).  And if a expectent cow doesn’t come up, you stick a few cobs in your pocket so you can find where she had the calf and then get close enough so you can inspect the calf while she’s being calmed by your delightful treat. 

So I’ll always raise some corn. Our solution right now is to grow a small maze for a local non-profit and then take the corn from it for these treats.  (As above.)

There is the option of using milo for this, if you bind it and simply throw the binders to them for feed. Won’t fit ina bucket, though.

My ideal would be to get away from harvesting anything except through cattle, since they are extremely efficient in turning forage into meat. And the theory is that if you raise the right crops, the integration of cattle will actually cut out both harvest and fertilizer costs.  All you’d have to do is to cultivate the soil and then broadcast the next set of seed.

Theoretically, you could get away from spring planting with wheat, rye, and barley. Then graze the remainder during the summer (when pastures are short on grass anyway.) These take seeding them into clover and reseeding clover every three years or so, since the yearly cultivation takes a hit. The trick with this looks to be simply disking once, and lightly enough that it just opens up the soil so the new seed can make contact without wrecking the clover root structure entirely.

Practially, you can get a clover seed crop as well – and then turn the cattle in to clean up the leftover stems.  Set aside some of each crop area for the next year’s seed.

If you raise milo as a winter forage as above, you could theoretically get away from having to hay at all. Sure, you’d have some as a back up, but I can see the day that I just use milo or windrowed pastures during the winter so the cattle can get to it through the snow and ice. Keep the tractor in the barn all winter, nice and dry.  Use an electric golf cart (heated cab?) to check the cattle and move temporary fences to designate their next feeding area.

I mentioned cattle as being more profitable – it’s only that there is over two years before you see any of that money.  Takes that long to grow a steer or heifer you can send to market. So you always have a leapfrog scene of cows, calves, and yearlings in your pastures. Plus the bull.

But your investment is mosly fences and watering supplies.  With my planting crops every year for their use, I’m increasing inputs slightly. However, by grazing your crop-land, you are also then extending how many cows you can actually effectively feed on your land – and so you’ll have more calved to sell to market. This means your output increases proportionately to taking the middleman out of the picture. 

Another rotation that might work:

1. Milo fed over winter, with oats/clover frost seeded and then grazed – this is actually a complete year-over-year rotation by itself.
2. Wheat over-seeded into clover (fall), and grazed after spring harvest of seed and straw. 
3. Rye, followed by cowpeas and sunflowers – out by July in time for Milo.

You can harvest your own seed from all of the above except Milo.  If you cultivated after the wheat and planted a short-season Milo in June, you’d then be able to get seed – and rye would be able to root if immediately again cultivated and broadcast into the milo ground.

Milo would replace the ground corn in chicken feed. Chickens (in mobile huts) follow cows in their rotation through the pastures, according to the Salatin plan, and pay their  own way with meat and eggs – as well as scratching the cow paddies into oblivion and getting rid of worm parasites from the cattle.

There’s another point to touch on – rotating cows through tree pastures. This drives the extension specialist nuts. They show you pictures of trees where the cows have packed down and eroded the ground around them. And where you have an individual tree, this does happen. 

The trick is to have small groves of trees with pasture surrounding or in between. Grass grows better in partial shade. Cows will graze longer if they can stay cool while they do. Trees, like any crop, need to be weeded. Plus, there are a variety of forages cattle need in the spring which grow in wooded lots among the trees. Tannin is used as a natural dewormer by cattle – meaning live oak leaves are valuable. The specialists I’ve talked to don’t know what cattle eat out there.  But something they need.

I’ve also seen that woods will lose a lot of their brush if you run cattle in them. Smaller sprouts get grazed off and so the trees are able to grow with less competition, so they develop straighter trunks. Dead branches are trampled, speeding decomposition – which are mixed with cattle manure and urine to promote growth. 

Doesn’t mean the wood lots are brush free. Anything with stickers or thorns is left alone (other than first growths – blackberry leaves are a nice tonic for cattle as well as humans). So there is ample opportunity for new trees to sprout among the brambles. Locust, gooseberry, blackberry, raspberry, multi-floral rose – these all have their place. 

And like any pasture, you don’t keep cattle in there all year round. You rotate pastures, which includes the woods in them. 

There is also an interesting crop rotation which has trees in there as well. If you were raising walnuts, this would be a 50-year rotation before you could harvest for lumber. And you’d get the nuts after the first 7-10 years. I’ve read of some fast-growing pulp tress which are harvested after 10 years. So you’d plant these in long north-south rows, far enough apart to give decent shade when they were grown, but not dense shadow. And you’d probably plant them in groves, or staggered, so that they would force each other to grow straight and tall, plus protect against sheer winds. And I imagine that you’d raise bramble-berries amongst them at the base for the first few years to protect them from being grazed off as you rotate cattle through your covercrops – since you are still farming inbetween.

The later years would require different crops – like alfalfa or something that does actually better in partial shade as opposed to requiring full sunlight – like most row crops we raise. And when the trees are harvested,  you’d go back to rowcrops while the trees were young. At least that’s one idea for this rotation. 

A smarter approach would be to plant young trees at the base of older trees  - staggering your crop to mimic nature, so that you don’t take out all the trees at once, but plant new ones (which are later thinned) where the old one is removed and there is now sunshine in that gap. What this would go is to give you some tree harvest every few years – instead of once every 50 years, as is done currently. And it takes that long to heal the ruts those loggers leave…

That probably points a farmer in the direction of using cattle to help raise trees and grass – and then get out of row-cropping for the most part. 

My current scene, while it points me in that direction, says that I just simply integrate what I have better to continuing lowering the inputs while not making any drastic changes that alarm the neighbors.

By taking the whole farm, and utilizing the natural integrative components which exist, the farmer doesn’t have to work as hard, has more profits due to less inputs, and enjoys a creative life filled with new opportunities and learning experiences.

It’s the farmer’s job to be a good steward of all of these components. Tend to the wood lot as well as the pastures. Keep the cattle well fed, but use them to manage the pastures and woods. 

Selling cattle and crops keeps the humans rewarded for stewarding the land.

Really, I have a book on this subject to write, when all is said and done. But there’s a lot more to be said. And the great point about farm-blogging is that it allows that writing to get started…

- – - -

OK, now you just got a glimpse into my mental processes in this area. 

And I’m sufficiently debriefed that I can now sleep after all this physical labor yesterday and today. 

Thanks for listening. Drop by for a steak, fresh vegetables, and garden-raised salad some day. That’s what makes farming worth it – the best food.