Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Gwen Giffen" <ggiffen@1st.net>]

"How are you going to raise those livestock animals if you do not have
grains?  You might be able to have pasture year round in the south but not
in the north.  You have to have silage, grain, and pasture to my way of
thinking.

Barbara"


We live in Ohio (the "north"), and my husband has wintered beef cows on hay 
and pasture alone several winters with no adverse affects to the cows. In 
fact he says they get fatter and have less health problems on hay than on 
grain, and the vet tech who comes to help with difficult calving and sees 
all, confirms that this is generally true with well-managed grass-fed beef. 
(Read James Harriot). We make our own hay. He doesn't buy it, and it isn't 
alfalfa. It is a grass mix. He does not use horses because it is harder and 
slower than tractors. But we still have some of the equipment and a draft 
horse.

My great grandparents raised a family of 11, and my great uncles ran a 
Jersey dairy on the 68 acre farm I live on, using only two Percherons to put 
up all the hay, grain and insilage for all the animals. After a couple years 
short of 100 years it is still farmable. We have pictures of the horses and 
some of the labor - the men on insilage day for instance. Back then the 
farmers took turns helping each other and made a party of it. I have worked 
as a nurse in a nursing home, and have had aging farmers from 45 miles away 
tell me farm stories about my relatives and the work they did together. I 
have pictures of the milk stand with a sign with the business name on it - 
owned by a cooperative business of adjoining farmers.

If we had to, we would go back to this type of community for survival. It is 
wierd to read posts by people who haven't farmed this way and theorize about 
how it would or wouldn't work when you either have done it yourself or know 
how it was done.

It sort of reminds me of the song, "There's a hole in my bucket. dear Liza."

Gwen