Friday, March 26, 2010

Dirt Farming?

Aside from a vegetable garden, I've never done any dirt farming. By "dirt farming" I just mean anything that involved plowing and planting things in rows.

This is happening because I wanted a way to put more weight on the lambs before they get to market age.

Most small sheep farms just buy feed and add it to the pasture diet of the lambs. This is not something I want to do because many of my customers prefer that the meat they buy has not been feed much grain, and no genetically modified feed at all. All the corn and soy available commercially contain these things.

The main problem of raising row crops on a small farm in the expense for the equipment needed to do it. That equipment includes tillage equipment, planting equipment, weeding (herbicide sprayers and/or some sort of cultivator), and harvesting equipment. Of all this equipment the harvesting tools are usually the most expensive.

My plan is to use the lambs as the harvesting equipment. To harvest the crop, I plan to use electric fencing to allow the lambs into the field a bit at a time and allow them to eat it down to the ground.

So I'm planting about three acres into corn and cow peas. I have a two disk plow, a tiller for my little tractor, and I bought a planter/cultivator just for this and future such projects.

Planting should take place tomorrow, I'll post about it.

1 comment:

LeAnn said...

Nice to see you posting! I've missed your adventures. :)