By far the biggest line item (other than a mortgage) that you’re going to run into with a small farm is the food bill. Poor Mr. Fix-It goes to sleep at night muttering about “more mouths to feed.” Food and water are the bottom lines of your small farm enterprise. If you don’t have them, everything else needs to go! Sometimes I feel like we’ve tried everything at one time or another! {smile} Here are some of our experiences, which might help you evaluate your own options moving forward.

Here are a few feeding basics we always keep in mind…

• Junk in, junk out. You are what you eat. This is even more true for your animals.
• Consistency is key. Animals don’t adjust easily to feed changes, whether composition, amount or even timing. Consistent products and consistent feeding routines will eliminate a lot of health concerns before they even get started.
• It’s easier to match your animals to the available feed than to match feed to the animals. Find livestock breeds/individuals that can thrive with your existing farm conditions. If you’re going to feed grass, have good grazers!

So naturally, the place to start would be at the bottom.

GRASS

Assuming you have grass on your farm, this is one time where cheap and easy DOES equal healthier! If you’re in a situation like we were when we started and you don’t have any grass–good luck. It’s an uphill battle. But I will tell you that every year we have a bit more grass and feed less hay and the ledger balances better and better.

You can get all the healthy-to-you breakdown on a grass-based approach in Jo Robinson’s book Pasture Perfect, a quick and easy read from a journalist who uncovered an amazing amount of research on the benefits of eating grass-fed food.

When it comes to the benefits for your farm and livestock, most books these days sort of start on the premise that you already know grass-fed is best. If you’re on the fence about how important a grass-based system is for the small farm, I would suggest starting with All Flesh is Grass by Gene Logsdon. He goes over the whole, big picture. Once you’re convinced that grass is the key, then I would strongly suggest Small Scale Livestock Farming by Carol Ekarius. I’ve recommended it before here on the blog and it is just excellent at laying out a diversified, grass-based livestock plan. It will give you all the basics to understand rotational grazing, multi-species grazing, and farm planning.

Managing grass is an art form. It takes a lot of research, study, and trial and error. But here’s something to keep in mind about grass–you don’t need troughs, buckets, pans…you don’t need to scrub anything…you don’t need the tractor to move it…you don’t need a trailer to haul it…you don’t need any muscles to unload it, the benefits for a small farm are infinite.

HAY

Ok, but even in the best circumstances, there are seasons without grass, right?

Not necessarily! Hay is just grass that was cut while fresh, dried, and then baled and stored for later in the season. Hay is just dried grass. (Straw is dried wheat stalks, completely different!) Just like the difference between fresh and dried fruit, it loses nutritional quality when it’s dried vs fresh. But the better quality grass you had to begin with, the better it is dehydrated.

Hay as a feed source is much trickier than it seems at first. There’s much more to it than just buying a bale and tossing it out there. You need consistent, high-quality over the feeding season for your animals. Sometimes we’ve found a great hay source, but they run out before the season is over and we have to switch. Not ideal. Sometimes we find a consistent source, but the nutritional quality is low and we have to supplement to maintain our ewes’ body condition. Not ideal. Or you find a great source but can’t afford it. Or you find a great source, but you don’t have somewhere to store it all winter so you start losing bales to mold and mildew.

Then there’s the idea of baling it yourself. That’s a great idea! (We want to get there one day!) But it takes a lot of equipment, storage, and supplies. And there’s an art to it as well. Knowing when to cut, when to bale, how to store…It’s just not as easy as it first seems. We’ve had our fields custom-baled (meaning we paid someone to come cut for us) but we found that the quality wasn’t there yet and we were better off just buying for right now. The cost of supplementing to make up for that low quality was more expensive than investing in higher-quality hay to begin with.

We feed hay all winter from around the end of November (when the grass dies off) to around March (when it comes back). I’ve written about how important that grass calendar is to us here at The Lowe Farm. We have struggled with finding a consistent supply of quality hay at a price we can afford to allow a profit. We have found that locally produced hay lacks nutritional qualities we rely on in a primarily grass-based system. We prefer to only grain our ewes in late pregnancy, if possible. With poor-quality hay, we have to supplement more to make up for the nutritional difference.

You also have to determine how you’re going to feed it. Mr. Fix-It has constructed several different feeders over the years from pallets and hog panels. Small ones to go around round bales. A big one to go with big square bales. A small one to fill with small square bales. And we have one rack/trough combo unit that we use in our lambing fields. It’s all trial and error, so borrow or buy used to start with and figure out what you like.

GRAIN

Again, in a grass-based system, grain is a supplement, and amounts will be determined by the nutritional quality of your forage. The key is to have a consistent mixture and feed with routine amounts and times. We’ve tried everything from supplementing only with corn to mixing our own feed, to bagged feeds.

We live in an area that’s not known for sheep, so mixing our own feed was challenging. We couldn’t find the grains or additions we wanted without special ordering, which was dangerous unless you ordered the entire winter upfront. Who knows when a shipment would be delayed or canceled? Plus all the shipping costs!!

Using only corn works for several other sheep producers we know, but in consultation with our vet over the first couple of years, we believe it wasn’t working for us because our hay was just not consistently high quality. They needed more than just calories from the corn. So we started getting some of our hay tested and went to a general-ration bagged feed as a grain supplement with free choice hay the second half of the winter when our ewes were in late pregnancy and early nursing. We saw a significant improvement in body condition, so this is a program we’ve stuck with.  Eventually, we went to buying a pallet of feed from TSC at the beginning of the season so we don’t have to worry about them running out when we need it (because it was happening a lot). We also get a bulk discount for buying 25+ bags at once (5-10%) and you can use a coupon!! So we usually get an additional 10-20% off if we order between Thanksgiving and Christmas when there are “off-your-entire-order” coupons floating around.

We use a plain old, open trough feed bunk for the cows. Works great. The sheep are a little trickier because they are crazy about food! The pregnant ewes will leap up in that wide trough and slip and slide and even flip themselves over like a stranded turtle trying to get to the feed first. So Mr. Fix-It made them wooden feeders that are too narrow for them to jump in. (See the chickens in the top image.) Works great and they can all be moved around with the animals from field to field, either by hand or tractor.

That just leaves the water. This is kinda a big deal here in Tidewater where the summers can easily spend weeks in the 100-degree range.

WATER

Our super-duper, fancy water system?

Hoses.

{shrug} We just use garden hoses. And when the hoses are frozen, we use 5-gallon buckets. We have cheap green ones that only last a few seasons, and we’re slowly replacing those with nicer (but still on clearance!!) commercial black ones. They run all over the farm along the fence lines (so they don’t get mowed!). We use black rubber 40-gallon troughs that can be dumped and moved with the animals from pasture to pasture. They’re very easy to clean. We have one large galvanized one from when we had horses (they drink waaaay more water than sheep and cows!) that we fill and then the kiddos use that to water the chicken house with buckets.

Eventually, we’d like to run water lines to have a spigot over in the big pasture so we don’t have quite so many hoses {smile} but it works for now and that’s quite an investment.

Our series continues with links below–And be sure to sign up below for our newsletter and receive your FREE copy of our Finding Land Worksheet, to help you in your homestead planning!

You’ll also find an updated version of this worksheet in our Starting Your Homestead Printable Pack!

I’d love to hear about and learn from your experience too! Did you have something you recommend or something that totally didn’t work for you that you’d like to share? 

Dollars and Cents of Starting a Small Farm

Starting a Small Farm: LAND

Starting a Small Farm: BUILDINGS and SHELTERS

Starting a Small Farm: FOOD and WATER

Starting a Small Farm: HEALTH and WELLNESS

Starting a Small Farm: CHOOSING LIVESTOCK  (Part 1) and (Part 2) and (Part 3)

Starting a Small Farm: THE HOMESTEAD GARAGE

Starting a Small Farm: SMALL FARM TAX BINDER

Starting a Small Farm: USING GOOGLE CALENDAR FOR MAINTENANCE RECORDS