Surprise - New Beltie calf... the plan is afoot.

Guess I now owe you a picture - or several. We had a heifer with our supposedly not-quite-ready bull and 9 months later: a surprise Beltie-cross heifer. Cute white mini-stripes on her sides. Otherwise, all black like her mom.

So the plan I told you about yesterday is now afoot. First product off the line. Now she'll be bred back to her grand-dad (called line-breeding, which is OK) and we'll then take the offspring of that match and again give her (hopefully another heifer) over to the Beltie bull, which will give us about a 65% Beltie/Angus cross. If we then get another heifer, it would be a good time to have a Beefalo bull (black, polled) to get our first Belted Beefalo.

Means about two years for the this heifer, another two + 9 months for the next, then another 2yr, 9 months to get my first Belted Beefalo - if I get all heifers. That's why I'll have multiple cows to service. Steers get sold and heifers get serviced to create more.

2 years is really because I want to keep them bunched up in the spring. They are ready at 18 months, but this would give me a fall calf. So keep them separate for another 6 and then in with their first bull.

I'll have to crunch the numbers on this one, as she is only about 20 months now, and wasn't supposed to go in with this bull until just a few weeks ago. So she was bred at 11 months and we were awfully lucky. Good thing Belties are known for low birth-weight calves...

Study this one some more.

Pix tomorrow, hopefully.

One good point is that all the time I've spent raising this heifer made her very willing to have me simply stand and scratch her, even get her first milk down for that calf and help him find her teats to suck. Hope she continues being this docile. Makes it easy to raise them when they are.

Means I need to continue hand feeding my heifers especially so they are easy to work with for their first calf.

Cheers. Hope your day had such pleasant surprises...

Beef, Beefalo, and Whole Farm Management

If you're going to run a farm, you need to run it profitably - which oddly enough is environmentally responsible.

(I didn't say anything about being "environmentally friendly" or any such nonsense. Anyone who's been out in a blizzard rounding up cattle - or been charged by a protective cow - knows Nature isn't always "friendly". Coyotes, fox, mink - these aren't friendly; but they sure are necessary.)

That said, farmers need to be good stewards - regardless of government subsidies or lack of them, environmentalists or lack of them. (And in both cases, being left alone is better in all cases.)

Here's the facts about raising a cattle/crop combination farm as I've figured them out over the last 8 years since I started farming full time:

• Commodity farming keeps you broke. It's not sustainable for small farmers.
• Small farmers raise most of the beef in this country on herds of 100 or less.
• Cattle are mostly raised on land too marginal for cropping.Then expensively finished in feedlots.
  
• Crops do best when they have animal manure in addition to mineral-based supplements.
• Spraying isn't needed if you're planting in the right combinations and proper sequences (like rye before corn or soybeans).
• The easiest and cheapest crops to raise are grass and trees.
• Cattle is cheaper than raising row crops if they're raised on grass and pasture-finished.
• The less you have to take your tractor out, the less you have to spend to run it.
• Right now, the best-quality and most healthy beef you can raise is beefalo. And the cheapest to raise (eats a wider variety of forage and tolerates a wide range of environments).
• Cattle will keep eating in the shade on a hot day. Otherwise, they wait until it cools off.
• Grass grows better with partial shade some time during the day.
  

All that said, my conclusions are few:

1. Raise grass, hay, trees, and cattle.
2. Get the cattle rotated through any crop ground to fertilize it.
3. Plant new and thin existing tress into north-south rows so grass grows better and cattle eat more. Also add lots of watering holes/ponds.
   
4. Move over to Beefalo (and Scottish/Irish breeds like Highland, Galloway Belties, and Dexters) as they eat a wider range of forage. Add sheep and goats to clean up what they don't like. Rotate these on a frequent basis - keep them bunched up on your pastures.

Now, there are some strategies to accomplishing these:

A. Get Beefalo bull calves and put them on your existing Angus-mutt cattle when he's ready. (We're trying out a Beltie right now on this theory.) About 3 generations will get the maximum genetic improvements you're going to get. Then you trade or sell and buy a new bull (both Beefaloes and Belties are good for probably twice as long as the current Angus-commodity setup.)

In our case, I'll save back our heifers and replace our existing cows until I have everything into a 50-60% mix. Somewhere in there, I'll swap our registered Angus bull for a black polled Beefalo and ultimately replace that Beltie with another Beefalo or another Beltie. Belted Beefalo's - best of both worlds - beauty and efficiency.

That will take about 8-10 years to produce that specific genetic line, but once I get a single Beefalo bull, all his offspring can be sold as Beefalo. The premium price and better forage efficiency will require direct marketing, but will bring me better profits for my cattle.

Now, the size goes down, but smaller beef are more cost-efficient. Means I'll be able to raise more pounds of cattle for less cost per pound. And beefalo have a higher percentage of carcass as fat content is much lower. As well, you can market "freezer beef which will all fit in one freezer."

B. Crops - move off corn and soybeans. Plant stuff that doesn't require heavy equipment inputs. It takes me five times across a field to plant corn. Or buy a huge tractor and new "one-pass" tillage that it can pull so I cut it down to three - figuring that I fertilize as I plant. Sprayer is that last one. More expense.

Instead, go to fall crops and frost-seeding any bare ground. I found out that wheat and rye can be planted with a single disking and then broadcast along with the fertilizer - no harrow. Kinda bumpy - but with all that rough ground, the seed settles in just fine.

Wheat and clover (as well as Rye and clover) actually give you two crops - grain first (and straw if you want it) and then clover-stubble hay in July. Wheat and Rye also pretty much out-grow their competition (weeds). Rye after Wheat (because the former volunteers so badly). Third crop comes up next...

C. Get your cattle rotated through your crops. Means you need to plant cover crops. But - surprise - rye and wheat are great cover crops. One pass in grazing will still allow a crop to come up (and on rye, you almost need to do this, because a wet spring will lodge your rye and you'll have a mess with 6 ft tall rye headed out and turning yellow by May - been there, done that.)

While you can get hay cuttings by combining clover with those two, the idea is to actually bale only as much grass as you need to. Let the cattle harvest the grass and manure while they do. (Nature is just soooo efficient...)

Winter means stockpiling grass or raising something they can eat off the stalk. Corn's not bad for this - but has high inputs. Milo looks to be the next best bet - plant late enough (July around here) so that it's still green but has a nice head by killing frost. No matter what snow or ice (almost), they'll be able to find and eat it - and they take the stalk, too (according to reports). Trying this theory this year. I'll let you know next January how it turned out.

Then come back and frost-seed oats with clover in January/February. Take this off as forage or hay in June/July. Means you don't have to disk that field.

You put your fertilizer on with your rye, wheat, and milo seed - but only have to plant the clover once. Which also means that you only have two passes through your fields per year. Do the math. Less fuel, less breakdowns, more time doing other things.

This rotation:

1. Milo in July - grazed all winter, followed by frost-seeded Oats/Clover. Forage/Hay in summer.
2. Wheat in the fall, off as grain in June. Hay/forage the remainder in July. (There's your cash crop.)
   
3. Rye in the fall (clover still coming up) - forage early so you can either forage/hay in midsummer. Followed by Milo (1).

D. Means you'll need more fences (permanent or temporary) around your crop land and can add more cattle - so your profits go up since you are getting a better price and have much lower inputs all around. Keep some wheat and rye seed back for next year's crop. Only buy bin-run seed when you can (like milo). As the cattle graze your crop ground, they add high P and K manure (some N) which stays around for around 5 years. Meaning your fertilizer inputs will drop - especially since you aren't using a high N crop like corn.

Also means that you don't have to spray - probably not at all. If your cattle are taking off this crop, or you're cutting it for hay - any weed is actually eaten. Save your best parts for the seed you need. (Weeds only grow where they do best, so they are eating up some excess something out there - like why cockleburs grow so well in corn and soybeans. Excess phosphates and the same growing season length. It's so satisfying to cut them off with the hay in the middle of their growing season...)

Sure, if you're haying, its taking 4 or 5 trips across that field to cut, rake, bale, and haul - but those trips aren't all side by side - and it is over grass, not mud - so the compaction isn't anywhere near as extensive. Grass works to break up the soil (especially deep-rooted rye), so overall we're doing better - the only best way would be to pasture it only and never take the tractor out except for hayrides along the road. (Best of course, is to send your cattle out to harvest that hay...)

A note here: feed your hay on the same ground you cut it from. Cattle then put their fertilizer right back where it's needed. Means some different logistics about where you winter them...

- - - -

Summary is: work within Nature's system (and Man's economics) - and you'll have an easier time farming with far more profit.

Of course, this won't work for everyone. Our farm is about 250 acres, with only about 60 of it actually arable. The rest is trees and brush with grass in between. Lots of clay and soil worn out from farming it with corn. So I inherited a lot of rolling pastures where the gullies are slowly healing. And where 150 bu. corn is somebody's pipe dream.

If you've got a couple thousand acres of flat crop land that's tiled and drains well - knock yourself out. Plenty of demand for corn and soybeans. And you'll need to get a good price to pay for all that equipment you're using. But don't blame me if there's protesters outside your farm house saying how evil you are for burning all those fossil fuels.

"Thar's money in them thar niches" - as the phrase goes. I'll raise high-quality beef for less than it costs to raise corn-fed, artery-clogging, fast-food burger bait. And I'll feed it with crops that take less to put in and get out. As well, get top-dollar above commodity beef for every pound.

I'll raise low-input cattle and crops on a whole-farm basis and the devil with what other experts think is "best" or "proper" or "modern". And I'll just shrug when they tell me their advice and laugh all the way to the bank.

Still messing around with all this Internet stuff and geeky scene...

Up late, weird dreams and a failed server upgrade.

Seemingly too much stuff going on.

While I was trying to upgrade my Ubuntu server last night, I also figured out how to move my beef over to a beefalo blend, which could be sold at premium prices. And as well, how to shift to a fall-only "row" crop system.

Means I can spend less time in the fields - eliminate spraying altogether, minimize fertilizer (don't have to spend on Nitrogen for corn) and utilize my cows to both harvest and fertilize the crops.

So I spend less output and with Beefalo and no spraying, I can move over to Organic (more premium prices.) However, Organic is not always best for the land or the animals. Now that it's government run and controlled (thanks, guys) it has to be just so and has no leeway.

The trick is to get costs down and income up. Sticking to commodity anything ensures you only stay at subsistence levels. The smaller farmers need to get into profitable niches. (And since most of the food in this country is produced by smaller farmers selling to commodity purchasers - you have to wonder what would happen if we all did that... Market change, I guess.

Anyway, I've got cattle and I've got field crops. Use the cattle to graze my covercrops ahead of planting. Use covercrops to promote fertility. This is, of course, for growing corn and soybeans which have spring planting routines.

If/when I shift to fall-planted crops, they are both covercrop and also main harvest. Wheat, Rye, Barley would go that route.

Two points to this - most of these harvest in June, but plant in September (could plant in July, but might kill out in August as they are cold, not heat-hardy.) So I have a fallow zone or then plant another short-term variety (sunflowers, cowpeas, buckwheat would all do) just for that time. Means I have to run a tractor over the land - means more expense and more compaction for the soil.

Idea would be to run over the ground as little as possible, so I don't have a packed soil which roots don't permeate. With our clay soil, this has to be taken into consideration.

Now, add to this the idea of feeding cattle as little hay as possible. So raise milo late so it is still basically headed out, but green by the killing frost (Oct-Nov). Then cattle can feed on this through the ice and snow we get - and I don't have to feed them hay. Set up to try this this year.

All this came into play with thoughts last night (while reloading server operating system - which I'm still working on this am before going out to chores.)

General concepts:
Rye after wheat (it tends to volunteer - the reason for a third crop)
Milo after rye (July planting - it's drought tolerant).
Oats/clover frost-seeded over Milo, followed by wheat in fall.
Wheat raised with clover, taken off as grain and also then as hay mid-summer (or grazed).

Four crops in three years. Cows harvest Milo and can graze down rye/wheat once. Oats is taken off as hay or forage. (Use bin-run and for all seed, not pay for expensive certified stuff - plus grow and save back wheat and rye. Milo, oats, and clover only real expense.)

Advantage to all of these crops is that they can be broadcast-seeded - and essentially smother out other weeds. So I can get by with only disking once and seeding with the fertilizer. Rough ground takes seed better (different than corn and soybeans which need a smooth ground with set seed depth.) Corn takes five trips over the field (Two for preps, once for fertilizing, once for planting, once for spraying.)

Hay off rye (what you don't save for next crop) as this seed has to be dried and sold individually - isn't a commodity.

Essentially - all crops give hay. And I move over to producing grass and hay instead of conventional row crops - feeding corn to cattle for feeding (this never worked on our farm).

Probably sell the extra hay, as long as it pays for the fertilizer it needs to grow.

Meanwhile, I move over to cattle which sell better at a premium and are completely grass fed. I'm working up a beltie-beefalo mix, both of which eat a wider variety of forage and so will keep my pastures in better shape. Moving to smaller animals is also more efficient beef production.

Bottom line: Less fuel, less fertilizer, virtually no spraying, cattle have more feed - so I can run more cattle on that land.

And cattle on grass have very little input and high profit margin.

Upcoming: I can run sheep and goats on the same land with the existing numbers of cattle (a flock + herd = flerd). Land gets better use - and some studies show that this means number of cattle can be increased as land is more productive.

OK - thanks for listening. Time for chores. Meanwhile server has reloaded it's operating system (again.)