Getting creative with feed in a drought

So we've had a persistent drought going on. The last month with above normal rainfall was last August. I made what I assumed to be a good season's worth of hay back in December and was feeling pretty well on top of the situation. But hay is a supplement and a winter feed, not something I want to provide in lieu of nutritious pasture. Stock don't gain weight on hay and we raise a beast every year for the freezer, so with only about half a hectare of grazing land we need to manage feed budgets right down to the wire.

The grass growth slowed down in midsummer like it does in dry years, and I cut some of the coppice willows for feed. By late February we had about zero green on the paddocks and I was going down to the river every few days to cut willows. March was no better aside from cooling down a bit. I made the captain's call and rang our homekill butcher to come out two months early...better to move up the date since the situation was getting dire across the whole island. He sold me a bag of silage to tide us over until he could fit our beast in (every farmer in the district was culling stock by this point and all the freezing works were running extra shifts).

Then the pandemic hit, everything shut down, and it still didn't rain. We got a few showers, enough to put a veneer of green on the place but no actual growth. Trees were dropping their leaves by now from stress. The butcher had to sit tight and wait to get paperwork before he could travel and work, and when that came through his chiller packed up. So we got pushed back another month. More of our shelter trees got pruned and I did some selective scythe work in the orchard blocks, and started feeding out the hay. We also picked a corn crop and let them forage on the stalks.

Roll on into May. Hay is about gone. We finally got 70 mm of rain in the first week. Grass is showing signs of life, but the soil is still dry. Butcher came the other day to do the deed, but Spiderman (the steer) spooked and we deferred for safety and meat quality reasons. Never fear, there was one remaining block of corn to pick, so I did that yesterday and this morning I took down the hot wire. Enjoy this, Spidey, because it's the fat of the land.

Great post Phil. I don’t have cattle and not sure of their needs. In an effort to grow chicken feed and cover crop I’ve planted the cheapest wild birdseed I could find. I’m not even sure what that grain mix is. I have harvested millet and kenaf (I’m aware of what the leaves look like 😂) may be worth a try because it’s all extremely drought tolerant. Keep the faith. I hope things get better soon!

Thanks Scott. We're going to tackle the poultry feed next. I like your suggestions and hadn't really even thought of those two but they are now on The List for spring.

Update on Spidey: The butcher finally arrived on Wednesday. Hook weight 254 kg. He was amazed and congratulated us for our husbandry, as he's had to cull countless skeletal animals over the past few months. The rain has finally arrived, too, after nine consecutive months of below-normal totals. But it's too late to grow any appreciable pasture because soil temps are now well below 10 degrees and we've had a few good frosts. So the timing was good.

I know that’s not easy keeping weight on such a large animal. Good work!
Something I’ve been dealing with since we last posted is wood chips. The amount of bugs and worms that show up is insane. I’ve truly never seen anything like it. See what you can get and the kind doesn’t seem to matter at all. Pile them up and keep the chickens from them until you need free feed. I’m thinking of separate bins full of chips fenced off until I’m ready. One bin gets the chicken treatment then open the next. I hope this helps. Scott

Nicely done, Phil. Grass-fed beef is magnificent.

I recall farmers using grinders to chop hay and straw together to keep cattle alive in a drought. Not weight-gain feed, but it gave enough feed volume to keep ruminants alive and healthy.

Supplemental feed grain is commonly used here. Rolled or chopped, since whole grain passes right through a ruminant's stomachs without being digested.

Have you looked into silage? It gives tremendous feed value, utilitzing the whole stalk of plants and making it digestible through fermentation. NZ is dairy country; I'm sure it's commonly made.

I bought a large round bale of silage back in Feb to keep him going. The problem is that it's difficult to feed out the massive rounds on a small block without large equipment, and also the speed at which it goes off outpaces the ability of small numbers of stock to eat it. We probably wasted about 1/3 of that feed....

No one in the region had small bales of silage this year at less than exorbitant rates. Far cheaper to take the trailer down to the river and cut willows, which are classified as a noxious weed by the regional council.

I may make a silage pit next summer if the pattern looks like dry one again. Wrapping bales by hand is about as tedious as it gets, although I do a few every year when the grass is in oversupply.

Feeding willow shoots to cattle is completely new to me. Your steer actually found them palatable? Please give full details.

Cattle feed in a drought is ridiculously expensive. Hay can be shipped for a thousand miles. Some producers liquidate whole herds and walk away. But others have a carefully cultivated genetic breeding line, and will take take any and all steps to preserve it. It's brutal.

The sealed greenfeed bale method of making silage always bothered me, both for the plastic waste and for what I suspect was more than average feed waste. The mitigating factor was that, up here, much of it is fed in sub-freezing temperatures, where further spoilage is minimized.

A pit method is quite effective. I spent endless hours on a forage harvester, a ginormous chipper that produced very fine-cut feed, which could be packed very tightly (under the weight of tractors) to exclude oxygen. The stink of effluent during fermentation was apalling; but the result was  sweet smelling feed and cattle loved it.

And I am now curious as to how this could be done on a micro scale, for one animal. Hmmm ...

Willows are like candy to every ruminant I've met so far. Plus horses. They eat all the leaves and then start stripping the bark. Willow and many other types of tree browse are high in condensed tannins, which are both nutritious and good at diminishing internal parasites.

The types of willow I tend to feed are either the hybrid Matsudana that we have growing on the property, or the weedy crack willows that infest the riverbanks all over NZ. I just cut or break branches and let them have at it.

What types have you tried feeding? I suppose there are species that might be less palatable to stock, but I do remember that the native willows along watercourses in SE Arizona were always demolished whenever a mob of cattle got into them.

Definitely with you on the plastic bale wrap problem. I want to get away from that in every manner possible, so the pit is really looking like the way to roll. I might try one about 1m deep and 1.5 across at the top, and burn a couple of batches of biochar in it to turn the sides into terra cotta and seal them. Maybe a steel pipe for a drain...but where to take it? Will ruminate on this one over the winter.

Scott, what is the issue about not letting the chickens run wild with the bugs in the wood chips from the start?
Phil, can you roll out some of the big bail and then put it away until next time to protect it?

Nope, not without a tractor. A good one can weigh in at 750 kg. Not gonna budge that. If I had limitless time I would have left the round in one paddock, carefully unwrapped a corner, and taken off chunks to feed out before rewrapping the open part. But that's quite an undertaking, and after about a week of exposing the silage to oxygen it will start turning to compost (ask me how I know this). Better to just suck up the inevitable and let the critters hoe in.

John, I was just thinking of only giving the chicks part of the chips at one time. More of keeping some bug laden feed in reserve for harder times.

I’m not sure if this would help fill a niche in your forage problem or not. I also have Italian ryegrass as part of my cover/forage. It is considered a noxious weed but I have no problems with it. Now that daytime temperatures are going up it’s starting to die. At this point I either chop n drop or feed it to the chickens. It appears that my deer like it as well. I love regular ryegrass also but it is a pure annual that doesn’t reseed. I found some Italian growing in a friends field so I took a few heads. Now it covers a field and I’ve done nothing to help it along. I do toss extra coat and jacket cowpeas in amongst the rye. It climbs up the stalks and by fall it’s all a giant cover of biomass that all creatures seem to enjoy. Hope this helps. Scott

Perennial ryegrass is the cornerstone of commercial pasture in NZ. Our climate is often referred to as the "best in the world" for growing grass. This is a blessing and a curse, the latter because it's meant that for decades our pastoral farming has turned away from mixed pastures and gone into industrial monocrops. The number of ryegrass strains available at the local seed outlet is dizzying.

I've got lots in our pastures and I'm trying to reduce its dominance for a couple of reasons. One is general diversity and all the permaculturey goodness that comes from lots of species filling lots of niches and providing services that a monoculture leaves out. The other, and more urgent one, is that most of the ryegrass strains in this country are inoculated with an endophyte, which is a type of fungus. It's there to give resistance to an insect pest, the stem borer, but it also produces toxins that can harm the grazing animals. We've lost an alpaca to ryegrass staggers and it's not a nice way to go. Ryegrass also harbours an unrelated fungus in the litter, and in wet summers farmers have to keep their herds off some paddocks to avoid facial eczema.

So ryegrass will always play a part in the mix here, but I'm actually trying to reduce it to a walkon rather than the leading role.

Hey Phil,

It has certainly been a tough year on the land, but to be fair the last 4 years have been a bit average.
When I used to farm down around Timaru we would dry out around nov and not gain any relief until early march, what we would do is grow a turnip crop in late winter ready for feeding in dec, this along with a pasture containing chickory, dandelion and plantain, along with a sub clover. we found that this mix with a ryegrass would self regulate in a way, with the ryegrass outcompeting in the spring and autumn and the herbage growing well into early december ready for the turnips.

obviously something not as readily available to you is by-products, we used to get trucks of carrots and potatoes and cake ends and bread 2nds delivered for good prices. most of the times the pig farmers jump on the fruit shops, but its worth a shot seeing if any local growers would be keen on parting with non market worthy vegetables.

hope some of this helps.

Good info Benjamin! Sounds like a mix that would work well for most locations.

Thanks Benjamin. What you're describing is definitely the direction I'm heading, with lots more variety and deep-rooted plants like chicory in greater proportions to the grass. I already treat the maize crop as backup autumn feed, so I should probably consider a brassica like turnip as a summer fodder option. We never quite know what to expect in this region now. The "old normal" was wet through December and then drying out as the summer progressed with the possibility of good rains every 3-4 weeks. Now we've had a few years where it gets hot and dry in November, so we don't have the soil moisture in reserve heading into the hottest part of the year. But winters seem to be getting wetter, so I'm digging more swales and mini ponds right now to get that into the soil instead of running off. Fingers crossed....