Green Farm » corn

FARMS AND FARMING

dmin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:22:13 +0000

Farms are important to the world. We get nearly all of the food we eat from them. When our country began, most people were farmers. As they learned more about agriculture, farmers began to use science to make their crops grow faster and grow more. Farm animals were grown so that they made more milk or gave more meat. Old machinery became new, time and energy-saving machines.

Today’s farmer knows a lot more about farming than our ancestors did. Farmers need to know about the land, crops, animals, selling the products, managing money, and borrowing money when they need it. Tokyo Escorts

There are two groups of farms: specialized and mixed farms. Specialized farms raise crops or animals that grow well in their area. Farmers would not waste their time and money planting a crop if the climate would not let it grow well. Some examples of crops on a specialized farm are:
Corn Soybeans
Wheat Potatoes
Sugar beets Pineapples
Nuts Cotton
Flowers Christmas trees

Specialized livestock farms include about half of all farms in the United States . Some examples of animals on livestock farms are:
Beef cattle Sheep
Dairy cattle Goats
Hogs/Pigs Poultry
Horses

Some farms are mixed farms because they produce two or more products. The dairy farm we visited produced milk, calves to sell, plus corn, hay, and soybeans that they used to feed the animals.

MILK AND CHEESE

dmin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:23:23 +0000

HOW NOW, HAPPY COW?
Grass Fed Dairy — Milk and Cheese from Grass Fed Cows
On a fairly regular basis, Grinning Planet throws cow pies at “industrial agriculture”—those massive, corporate farming operations—while singing the praises of small farms and sustainable, non-chemical agriculture. It all sounds good: who doesn’t prefer the idea of varied, natural, lush fields to endless miles of genetically engineered corn stalks, and who can’t see that happy barnyard animals are better off than sad creatures trapped in cages, pens, and feed lots.
But deep down, we all must wonder at times whether industrial agriculture is just a natural evolution of farming, and whether without it our farmers would be unable to keep the abundant supply of food coming our way.Not only does the following article answer those questions with a resounding “no,” it’s also a great success story in a corporate-dominated farming world that is increasingly short on happy endings. It comes to us from the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, which has generously granted reprint rights.
~ ~ ~
Small Dairy Farms Get Greenbacks From Grazing
by Erin Toner, Great Lakes Radio Consortium
In the retail world, big-box stores have made it tough for small companies to stay in business. That’s also true for agriculture, where the big guys are massive feeding operations that house thousands of cows. Surviving as a small farmer in that world often takes a new way of doing business. Here’s the story of one dairy-farming family that’s found a way to stay in farming, and make a pretty good living….
DOWN ON THE DAIRY FARM
It’s one of those hazy and muggy summer mornings, where the air’s thick enough to soak up the smell of manure and dewy grass. Nearby, cows are swatting flies with their tails, eating grass and relaxing in lush, green pastures. These days it’s a lifestyle most dairy cows never get to experience. Most are confined in big buildings with hundreds or thousands of other milk-making machines (cows).
Howard and Mary Jo Straub didn’t like where dairy farming was going. So about ten years ago, they switched from a farm that warehoused dairy cattle indoors, to something called seasonal rotational grazing. Mary Jo explains how it works.
“The cows get a new paddock or area, and our areas are about five acres, and each day they would get a new five acres of grass to eat. We have 24 paddocks, so every 24 days, they would be back into the same five acres.”
And in those 24 days, rainfall and the cows’ own manure has helped the grass grow back in that first paddock, and then the second, and so on. This is very low-maintenance farming, and low-cost farming.
The Straubs don’t have to buy tons of grain to feed their cows. And they’re not applying pesticides or fertilizer to their pastures as they would on a corn field. They don’t have tons of manure to dispose of, they don’t have loans out on grain-harvesting machinery, and they don’t have to pay lots of employees to feed and manage their animals.
Howard Straub says farming is a lot easier than it used to be, and a lot more lucrative.
“We used to get up and milk, we did a three-time-a-day milking before. We mixed up five loads of feed for different groups of cows. Now we just milk the cows twice a day and when we’re done milking we open the gate and let them out to go eat.”
BUT IS GRASS FED DAIRY PROFITABLE?
Since their costs are so low, the Straubs make between 800 and 1,000 dollars profit on each of their 84 cows. Before, they made around 150 dollars profit per cow.
Howard Straub says grazing has made cattle the chief asset on his farm, instead of a bunch of machines. His cows are healthier because they’re eating grass, like they were meant to do. And because they get lots of exercise, the cattle live longer, produce more milk, and have more calves.
Even though the idea with grazing is that there are sprawling pastures for the cows, it doesn’t require any more land than confined feeding farms. That’s because you have to consider all the land that supports a herd of cattle, says Tom Kriegl, who studies dairy farming at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You can have a diary operation where the only land that you own is the land that the building sits on that you house cows in, and you might buy all of your feed for those cows and you would not own the land that the feed is grown on. But you actually need that additional land that the feed is grown on even if you don’t own it.”
ROTATIONAL GRAZING AND DAIRY FARMING’S FUTURE
Howard and Mary Jo Straub say they encourage all the young farmers they meet to make the switch to rotational grazing. And it is catching on. The Great Lakes Grazing Network estimates that almost half of all new small and mid-size dairies in the region are using rotational grazing.
Kevin Ogles is a grazing specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He says grazing is probably the future for all smaller dairy farms. But he says grazing is complicated, with benefits that don’t come immediately.
“The concept is simple. Mastering it—that takes a while. So, once people make the transition after doing it for a few years, that’s when you hear them talk about the economic gain. The quality of life has improved.”At this point, you could call the Straub family master grazers. Since they started ten years ago, Howard and Mary Jo have managed to pay off a 250,000 dollar mortgage. Today, they’re almost debt-free, and they’re able to stop farming for two months in the winter, when they head down to Florida, as Howard says, to take time for the fun things in life. He says that would never have been possible before.
© 2004 Great Lakes Radio Consortium
[Story originally aired on GLRC August 2, 2004]
Ah, that’s a great story.
So, while you contemplate that hot young star sporting the milk moustache, you might also consider buying milk that comes from a family farming operation. It takes a little time examining the labels—after all, they all try to SOUND like they’re old-timey dairy operations. Look for “pasture fed” or “grass fed” on the label. Not even the “organic” label is a guarantee that the milk came from happy cows munching on green grass, though organic is still a good alternate choice if you can’t find milk from grass-fed cows. Sometimes you can even find a brand of milk that is both organic AND grass-fed. Yumm! Moooooo. Yumm! Moooooo…
Publish date: 14-SEP-2004

COWS

dmin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:18:26 +0000

There are two kinds of cattle: the kind that are raised to become beef dinners and the ones that are raised for milk, butter, cheese, and ice cream. We will describe beef cows in our Cattle section. Dairy cows are treated differently than beef cows.

Some breeds of dairy cattle are: Holsteins and Friesians [most milk], Brown Swiss [high lands], Jersey [rich and creamy milk], Normandy , and the Dairy Shorthorn. Istanbul Escort

We visited the Makarevich Farm where the cows were all registered Holsteins. Dairy cows eat hay, corn silage [corn plus chopped up corn plants], soybeans, and alfalfa. They are also given ‘protein’ that is added to their food. When we visited the farm, we were surprised to hear how much the farmer has to pay to run a farm. One of those costs is the protein. We were told it could cost thousands of dollars a month just for that. This is why farmers try to grow as much food for their animals as they can.

Cows are called ruminants and can eat grass and other plants. Their stomachs have four chambers so that the cow can swallow, get the food partly digested, and then bring it back to chew on it again. The stuff that comes back up is called cud. [We found that gross, too.]

Dairy cattle are not built as heavily as beef cattle but they do have a wide rib cage. Their udders are large and hold milk. Before it can give milk, it has to have a calf, or baby.
Farmers use ‘selective breeding’ where they choose the parent cow and bull that they feel will make the best baby. We will call this the ‘chosen’ cow.

Embryos are taken from chosen cows. These are put inside other cows that weren’t chosen ones. They do the hard work of carrying and giving birth to the calf. Sometimes, when too many embryos are taken from the chosen cow or the farmer wants to save some of them for later, they will be frozen. Mr. Makarevich told us that this works well and the embryos are just fine when they are thawed. Females are pregnant for nine months and deliver the calf without any help.

After it is born, a calf is taken away from its mother. It is put into a stall by itself and is fed milk by bottle in the beginning and from a bucket later.
Veterinarians come to the farm when the cows need to have medical help. Farmers do not take any chances that the cows might get sick.

The farmer takes good care of the cows. In this picture, the cow is put in a cage that fits close to its body. The cage is turned until the cow is on its side. Then the veterinarian will sand off the hooves so that the cow stands right.

Cattle Industry History

dmin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:16:04 +0000

Cattle Industry History
The following excerpts on the history of the cattle industry were pulled from the book ” Building the Beef Industry” written by Charles E. Ball. The book was commissioned to commemerate the Centennial Anniversary of the national association.

A New Industry is Born
On his second voyage to the New World in 1493, Columbus introduced cattle to the Western Hemisphere. After a two-month, 3400-mile voyage, he set anchor at Hispaniola and unloaded his cattle. There the cattle thrived. In 1519, Hernando Cortez took offspring of these cattle to Mexico to set up ranches. Often the cattle roamed wild and later came to the United States by way of Texas and California.
Early American cattle originated in Europe but came to the Americas by many routes: Texas, Florida, California, Virginia and New England. By the time cattle reached Texas and California from Mexico in the 1500s, a cattle industry was emerging in Florida. Weighing 600 to 800 pounds these cattle known as woods cattle, Florida Crackers or Florida Scrubs, flourished and are still around today.
In 1607, cattle arrived at Jamestown, but none survived. More came in 1611, at which time Governor Thomas Dale issued a proclamation: “No man shall dare kill any bull, cow, calf… whether his own or appertaining to another man.” Thanks to this conservation and further imports, cattle became established in Virginia: an estimated 500 head by 1620 and 30,000 by 1639.
At the same time, animals from England northern Europe began arriving in New England and appeared in New York in 1625. On Manhattan Island, a wall was built between the Dutch commune and their outlying farms to protect against wild animals and Indians. This is the wall for which today’s Wall Street is named.
Expanding Horizons
By the 1890s there was a new range. Great herds of buffalo were gone; Indians were relegated to reservations; barbed wire had carved out farms; and a growing network of rails replaced trail drives. Cattle were now business owned by small as well as large producers. A new century was approaching and the world would change dramatically for the cattlemen.
The cattle industry of 1898 was not only regional, focused almost entirely in the West, but also differed substantially from today’s industry especially in how cattle were readied for and delivered to market.
The industry was organized to produce steers four or five years old which were shipped by train from local loading stations along the ever-growing network of rail lines to central markets as grass fat steers from July to November.
Stockyards provided the accumulation points for cattle coming in on the rail cars. Cattle were not fed as in today’s definitions, but rather sorted and distributed out to packers. There were no feeder or stocker cattle, and heifers were never slaughtered. What feeding there was in the Corn Belt was because midwestern farmers kept cattle to use up excess corn. But this was usually a sideline to their corn and hog economy.
Packers, too, had to be concentrated at the rail centers. They killed all kinds of livestock. Their customers were small butcher shops, which needed an assortment of product. The refrigerator cars were loaded with beef quarters hanging from the ceiling. The floor of the car had boxes of ham, bacon and lamb carcasses wrapped in cheese cloth and veal calf carcasses with the hide still on. Freight rates seemed high, but it was a one-way haul to the eastern markets. There was no back haul; stock cars had to go west empty.
Through out the history of the industry cattlemen have worried about the size and ethics of railroad, packers and eventually about buyers, feeders and any other group who seems to be operating outside of their control. At that time it was difficult for a rancher to realize that once the animal was slaughtered it became a very perishable product. It had to be moved into consumption no matter what the conditions, or lost entirely.