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Our pursuit of success vs. our boys

Jim VanDerPol

By Jim Van Der Pol, Kerkhoven, Minnesota — We are not doing so well with our boys. I know this because I used to be one. Statistics says that boys are twice as likely as girls to suffer and die from physical abuse. They are four times as likely as girls to commit suicide. Learning disabled boys outnumber girls, two-to-one.

Simple observation tells us that most boys reach manhood able to express one emotion only, that being anger. Half of all marriages fail, and in far too many of those failed marriages, the man walks away from the children. Our incarceration rates are now approaching seven per thousand of population, up from a mere one per thousand just 30 years ago. The large majority of prisoners are male. Prison building is our other growth industry along with the construction of suburban McMansions. We have a big problem. Continue reading “Our pursuit of success vs. our boys”

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Organic forum: What are you doing to reduce supplementation costs?

Cows on pasture

Kathie Arnold — My response to the growing cost of supplementation is to focus on improving the quality and yield of our pasture and hay crop to reduce the need for grain. That is playing out ina three areas: harvest management, seed selection, and focusing more on fertility.

With all of the recent research showing increased energy levels due to the reduced time baleage and haylage sits in a windrow respiring, we are trying to do “hay in a day” whenever possible. Other than pasture, haylage is the main forage for our milking herd. We mow in wide swaths with crushing rolls backed off as far as possible, as research has shown that leaving the stems whole facilitates quicker drying for baleage and haylage by allowing more moisture to flow up the stem and out the leaves. Crushing only seems important when we want to dry the crop all the way down for dry hay. Just prior to chopping, the cut hay is merged after having had the benefit of more sun and air exposure given the greater surface area in the wide swaths. Continue reading “Organic forum: What are you doing to reduce supplementation costs?”

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Solving the permanent pasture puzzle

Cows on pasture

By Nathan Weaver, Canastota, New York — Slowly the puzzle of proper grass production from semi-permanent pastures appears to be pieced together.

In the last decade we removed our farm from a forage/grain operation to a forage-only farm. We placed a heavy emphasis on forage harvestable by grazing cows.

Initially we looked at the new varieties of seed that had become recently available. These grass and clover seeds took us a long way beyond what we thought were the perimeters of grazing at that time. Quality feed and good summertime production were the standout improvements over the traditional forages available to us previously. Continue reading “Solving the permanent pasture puzzle”

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Grass-fed beef: What’s possible, what isn’t

Galloways on pasture

By Tom Wrchota, Omro, Wisconsin — Most of conventional agriculture treats productivity as the be-all, end-all for financially successful farming. Productivity is nothing more than measuring inputs and outputs, such as how many pounds of grain it takes to produce a pound of beef, pork, lamb, or chicken. So productivity is the study of how items relate to each other.

Much more important than productivity is profit, which is margin multiplied by volume, minus expense. Continue reading “Grass-fed beef: What’s possible, what isn’t”

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Well-fed, no grain organic Holsteins

Farmer with cows

Chetek, Wisconsin — Cheyenne Christianson has a simple answer for grazing-based, organic dairy producers besieged by escalating costs for purchased grain.

Don’t feed any.

While he doesn’t recommend that everyone follow his route, Cheyenne hasn’t fed a kernel of grain for nearly six years. And he is making no-grain work under what would seem to be less than ideal circumstances. Continue reading “Well-fed, no grain organic Holsteins”

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Where farmers and oil connect

Cows on pasture

By David Kline, Fredricksburg, Ohio — The past week I have been mulling 1874 sketches of two farms in Sangamon County, Illinois.

Maurice Telleen, founder and editor emeritus of Draft Horse Journal, sent them to me along with these words, “When I bought these two prints last April in Springfield, Illinois, my thought at the time was that Now and Then…or The Dream and The Reality comparison might be interesting to the readers. Downstate Illinois being what it is…it is possible that one of these places is a wheat field from end to end and the other a cornfield with a hog factory in the middle. The dreams that the 1874 pictures show us involve a lot of people, livestock, and activity. What do you suppose those same two pieces of ground show you now? Not many people and possibly no livestock. At any rate, I still haven’t figured out how to use them to tell the story of the depopulation of rural areas.” Continue reading “Where farmers and oil connect”