C Englund

As you're speaking of drain-tiling and building berms swales and hugels I assume you have a budget/access to equipment to do earth works. Is one spot of your land a bit lower than the rest? Have you considered digging a pond there, and drain tiling the rest into it?
There have to be some plants that will do well in wet soil and really suck up a lot of moisture to dry it out. I wonder if bamboo would do this? Maybe plant that around the perimeter of your land, it would serve as a windbreak and absorb water as it flowed into the lot, thus allowing your drain tiles to have less water to remove to the pond.
If you could post a panoramic view of the lot and maybe a satellite image, we could see the contour maybe?
I'm thinking you could look at the micro-contours of the ground, and trench out a waterway in every lower line you could find, down past water depth. Water with air exposure evaporates quicker than water under dirt, and you could plant water specific plants in them to use up the water, leaving 'islands' if you will higher and drier. And you could harvest whatever grows in the waterways for biomass to build soil on the 'islands'.

Is it just a foundation wall, ie a perimeter wall? Or is there concrete under the soil in the whole area? I'm guessing it's the former,a s the latter would only be for if there was a basement.

Leave it as it is, and build a hugel mound on that perimeter, or a fence, or something. Knocking it in and dealing with a wide strip of rubble fill (and having to dig out to knock it in and the rest of the possible problems) seems worse than dealing with a 6-8" raised lip. The more I think about it, mounding a hugel around the perimeter to hold in water/protect from wind seems a better and better idea.

One thing you may be concerned about is the previous owners probably had the topsoil dug out and just put fill dirt in, so you're going to need a pile of organic matter to make good growing soil.

Is there a reason you want shallow roots? Most people want deep roots for soil building...

Would Jerusalem Artichokes be too deep? (same family as sunflowers, but they have that big tuber that's only just under the soil).

Hugels certainly do settle over time, but like an earthworks, how you build it greatly influences that. Pack it well as you go and you'll get much less than if you just pile it up willy-nilly.

I think the hugel wall is a great idea for the thermal wall, but I would run the greenhouse structural posts to ground level (through the core of the hugel) I know there would be a rot/corrosion issue depending on what structure material you use, but I think the right materials could alleviate that, and it would be far better than having one side of your greenhouse settle up to a couple feet.

There are a lot of greenhouses built using earth bermed walls, and the walipini that is built in the ground.
Do you know what sort of materials you're using for the greenhouse? If you build a "normal" greenhouse with a rigid wall on the north side, you could then pile a hugel up against that. Maybe build a cob/adobe wall for the north wall as those are height/structure stable and natural. Yes you would lose the hugel growing surface inside the greenhouse, but you could easily make that up with tiered/layered beds or vertical growing containers.

Here in S. Indiana the soil has a very thin layer of topsoil over red clay. It's hard to even establish grass in some places, and the ground is either saturated or dry and hard. Pretty lousy.
I made some raised beds (just 8" high) by making the frame border out of some untreated 2x8 (Used a pair of 12' long boards, cut 3' off each end and so made a 3'x9' border).
Then I hugel'd them by digging out all the soil about 2' down inside the frame (It sort of looked like I was digging graves), and filling the hole to the ground level with tree trimmings/hedgerow clippings/whatever else natural woody material I could find walking around the neighborhood.
Then I piled all the dirt I had dug out (top soil and clay all blended up) back into the frame (some of it filtered/fell down amongst the wood, let the rest just build up as high it could, the peak was about two feet above the ground).
This was last fall, so I planted garlic and onions in it, put 2' tall fence around the beds (the dogs were having too much fun digging out all the loosened dirt, wasn't worried about other pests), and dumped in a 6-8" layer of leaves (walked around the neighborhood with a garbage can and scooped up the piles people raked out of their yards). I think I may have watered it once when it got really hot in the fall and the dirt looked dried out. Since then the soil has looked perfect, not saturated but not dry.
Now the beds are only about 6" above the frame top edge (they were almost 2') as it's settled and fell in over the winter with the freeze/thaw and snow and rain, and the leaves are only about an inch thick. The Garlic and onions have done very well I think, as even with 6" of snow on the ground the green tops have stuck up through it and kept growing.

Here's pics of digging out (all the dirt on the left, sticks on the right, framed hole in the middle), and then finished sans fence/leaves.



Also my greenhouse that I'm setting up aquaponics in/have lettuce and spinach growing in with single digit temps and snow this week No heat added other than the water pump and supplemental lights running.

K Nelfson wrote:Anyway, you don't need heat to curdle milk, if that's the goal. Use a non-thermophilic yogurt culture if you want control over the process, otherwise let nature take its course and you'll end up with curds in a few days.

This. Are you trying to have human consumption off this or just animal? On our dairy anytime we had a cow whose milk wasn't qualified for sale we'd just fill buckets/barrels with the milk and let it sit outside. One way or another (A day to a week depending on weather) it would always separate off and the chickens loved it.

Ben Walter wrote:

Oh, and you could always distill the run off Our corn silos will knock you over with the smell of 'shine.

LOL! I bet it's rough stuff.

Also, for those of you that have failed at making silage, I'm assuming it's pretty obvious when it's spoiled and not preserved. Is that the case? What are signs of spoilage?

I guess it would be if you distilled it. All the animals love to lap up the juice. It really smells pretty sweet as it is coming out.

It will be ugly and smelly if it's not good. You may be able to see mold, and it will be an odd shade of brown/black. It will smell moldy, rancid, rotten. Good silage should come out more or less natural green (some fading or darkening is fine) (I'm not sure what color the potatoes would turn) and smell good. We've had visitors to the farm try to eat the silage coming out of the silo because it smelled so good.

You really don't want to use the dried stems, because the majority of the non-fiber nutrients (the sugars, proteins, etc) are gone into the seed or the root or just plain broke down. You won't get a proper fermentation, and chances are you won't be able to get enough of the air out for it not to spoil even if there was enough sugar to make it kick. Farmers doing this in silos will go so far as to fill them with C02 to get out the air for high quality feed. It really needs packed in with the right moisture and sugars level.

The 55 gallon drums is a great idea if you can get the lid to seal right. Robust enough to take packing the chopped forage in. And they already have drains in the lids! That whole bit with the hole punched hose seems a bit much, if 30' diameter x 100' tall silos don't need one, a 3' bag shouldn't.

Oh, and you could always distill the run off Our corn silos will knock you over with the smell of 'shine.

Sorghum isn't an unusual silage crop, however grain and forage sorghum are different varieties. Forage sorghum copes with dry weather better than forage corn. Silaging requires green (wet) crops though so you won't be getting the grain harvest off them.

I had not heard of using sweet potatoes and vines, though I don't see why it wouldn't work (I mean obviously they're doing it wherever that brochure was designed for).

Before you try making any I cannot stress enough though that the moisture content has to be right (I guess that's why they were adding the molasses water, we always just harvest when the crop is at the right stage...), and that it has to be well packed and pretty darn airless. If it gets air it will spoil, and if it comes out smelling moldy, rotten, or rancid, it's mulch, not feed. Even birds or animals poking holes in your bags, if you go that route, will cause a layer of spoilage around the outside.

Are you planning on using the bag system shown in the brochure?

Where are you, OP? Location, weather patterns, soils, etc. so heavily affect the outcome of your idea.

If your local cows are high production breeds, switching them over to a grass diet will guarantee a drop in production, and potentially shorten their productive life. It'd be like trying to feed an NFL linebacker on a desk worker's diet. Production dairies feed highly developed rations that aren't just corn and hay. The variety of forage, ensilage, dry roughage, grains, and supplements combine to a highly balanced and calculated ration.

On top of that, you could damage your fields as cows on wet ground is a death sentence to grass. They are heavy animals on relatively little hooves. You have to be very careful when you allow cows on pasture. In the US long term weather patterns are making for highly concentrated water events, less often. So you're looking at 1 week per month where you should not allow cows on the ground to save your land. Then you have cold winter months where you need to supplement your feed as the grass went into hibernation, and dry summers where the grass goes into hibernation. Maybe New Zealand has a better (more temperate year round) weather pattern allowing cows on the ground year round. And I'd be curious to see their milk prices and production levels. Powdered milk is the cheapest commodity level, so I'm guessing they're doing very low cost, low production levels.

Grass fed milk cows are totally doable, but I would recommend a smaller, lower production, higher value milk breed (Jersey's or some such), rather than a big high volume cow like an Holstein.

Most American farms could not make it as a grass-fed operation, because the general market price is too low for that. Grass-fed, organic, etc. feel-good labels have a limited saleability niche that can support the higher costs they require (land, fuel, etc aren't getting cheaper). Most people aren't willing to pay that premium. And to tell you the truth, there is a growing movement in industrial agriculture to be more "sustainable" to avoid another dust-bowl. Industrial scale monocultures are able to be put into rotations and cover crops that can both reinvigorate the soil and allow the continued use of highly efficient machineries.