Ping to self. Thanks for this thread.
I have a question for either gardeners or preppers. I am trying to think down the road for prepping for farm animals more than just stacking bags of grain in my feed room.
I can do corn, but it is very little yield for the space. I always plant some to keep the heirloom seeds going. But any ideas what I can plant to use for supplement feed for chickens and goats? I’m in zone 8
Any grain like rice or wheat should work for the chickens. Goats will eat anything just don’t leave them for a long time in one spot.
In zone 8, goats shouldn’t need any supplementation.
Paddocks and “stockpiled forage”. That is keeping them off areas and letting it grow. I’m just starting to get into that. I let them on a spot last year in November. If I hadn’t kept them off of it, they would have had it eaten down short already. Only after they had eaten every tree/shrub leaf they could reach did I let them have access to that little paddock. They were starting to eat brown leaves off the ground at that point. I need more cross fencing for more paddocks to do it right.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stockpiled+forage
Look up Greg Judy on youtube. He only feeds hay when he unrolls it to use for seeding bare or thin spots. Other than that, he stockpiles forage. He’s a little ways Borth of me in Missouri.
If I rake away some leaves in some places, there’s green grass underneath. If I go down the road to some bottom land that hasn’t been mowed or had animals on it in a few years, I can see green grass down in the tall brown grass. That same piece of land comes up the hill and is right across from me. It’s not bottom land but hasn’t been mowed or had animals on it either and I bet if I(or the goats) went over there and dug around, there would be something green or at least edible. The deer seem to be eating something there.
I did have a neighbor give me four round bales that his old horse can no longer eat because her teeth are about shot. The goats are on the last one now. The hay was two years old already but kept in a pole barn. It’s got mold on it which will kill goats but they just work around it. I need to cut some more trees and let the sun in to get more pasture.
We bought a couple of dairy bucks years ago. The leaves had fallen already so I asked what they’d been eating and the girl pointed at the brown leaves on the ground and said “they seem to like it well enough”. They didn’t look to be starving. Goats will eat the bark off of trees if they have nothing else but I don’t plan on letting that happen.
I do plan on getting some seed and planting winter forage at some point. Not sure what yet. Most any typical winter cover crop for this area would do. I don’t have a lot of land and most of it is still forest.
I’ve been eyeballing bottom land around here. There’s 50 acres with a large hunk of bottom land that someone just bought a couple of years ago for recreational use. One of these days I plan to approach them and ask about putting the goats on it during the winter when they’re not coming down. The goats would clean it up nice form them and I’d be getting free forage for the goats, a win, win. There’s deer out there foraging every time I go by right now.
I’ve got a hen I haven’t fed in two years and she still lays eggs. The hawks got the rest and I figured she wasn’t long for this world so I quit feeding her.
“But any ideas what I can plant to use for supplement feed for chickens and goats? I’m in zone 8.”
My chickens always loved split melons or anything in the Brassica Family (cole crops: cabbage, kale, broccoli, turnips, kohlrabi, etc.) All are easy to grow and nutrient dense.
Goats will eat just about anything, in my experience! :) Here’s a good article from Mother Earth News on growing for goats:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/growing-feed-for-goats-zbcz1502/
Sweet potatoes. Nutritious for all critters. Winter squash. Heirloom Sweet Meat has been very productive for me.