And  at the edge of the field, you might see neat 1,200-pound round bales of hay wrapped in white plastic. It’s as if, my daughter once noted, a giant has strewn about a bag of huge marshmallows.

Hay—basically dried grasses and plants—is the single most important source of nutrition for animals in the winter months, or when access to good pasture grass is limited. A dairy farmer, for example, needs an acre of pasture per cow. If she is running a hundred head in New England, it may be hard to find that much pasture in one spot. Hay to the rescue.

In the winter, cattle stay out in the open and are exposed to a wide range of temperatures and conditions. In fact, cows will calve in all conditions.  But as the temperature drops below freezing, a cow burns more energy just to maintain body heat.  Ranchers use about one-half to three-quarters of ton of hay to fatten out a single steer. Horses, meanwhile, consume as much as 2.5% of their body weight in dry matter daily, or about 22- to 24 pounds of hay daily for a 1,000-pound horse.  That’s about a half- small rectangular bale of hay per day.  Horses might get the smaller bales of hay, but cows are getting the giant marshmallows. They round bales are easier to move about by machine rather than muscle.

For Robin and Allen Cockerline of Whippoorwill Farm in Lakeville, Connecticut, their cows are grass fed, grass finished. No grain for these guys, even though some will insist that corn is necessary to fatten a cow to our American taste.

There are health benefits, too, from sticking with grass and plants. According to Eat Wild, cows raised on pasture have less total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and fewer calories. Grass-fed beef also has more vitamin E, beta-carotene, vitamin C, and a number of health-promoting fats, including omega-3 fatty acids and “conjugated linoleic acid,” or CLA.

Alfafa’s Not Just a Friend of Spanky’s

Hay falls into a number of categories including grass, legume, mixed (grass and legume), and cereal grain straw (such as oat hay). The names of grasses have a certain beauty: brome, bluegrass, fescue, orchard, redtop, reed canary grass, ryegrass, Sudan, and timothy. Alfalfa, a legume and the “standard by which all other hay is judged,” provides more energy, protein and calcium than most grass hays. But alfalfa is worth it—with “twice as much digestible protein per acre as mixed clover-timothy hay, and over three times as much as corn. It is also richer in vitamins and minerals.” Alfalfa also tastes better for horses that turn up their noses at other hay.  Cows tend to be less finicky.

Is It Time to Hay?

If it finally stops raining after a week, and the grass is dry and high, don’t expect to have your farmer friend over for dinner that day. He will be out putting up hay. About once a month from June to August, farmers are looking at a crop that can mean the difference between making it through the winter months or going into debt.  A good supply of hay stored indoors under good conditions will reduce winter feed costs. Your herbivores will thank you, too.

Greenhouse farmers are exploring new types of growing, including hydrodynamics and the vertical greenhouse farms that Backyard Farms employs. Theoretically, a greenhouse farm can be located in the desert or on the roof of an office building in midtown Manhattan.

Greenhouse Farming a Business and an Art

Jack Algiers of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY has a stunning greenhouse with plants bedded in soil.  The level of analysis and detail that goes into running his operation is extraordinary. It has to be: Of 22,00 square feet in the greenhouse, he can farm on just 13,000 square feet, or less than a quarter-acre. To make the most of this land, Jack harvests twice a week year round. He calculates the output of his greenhouse down to the square foot., andhe’s ready to share this information with other farmers to give a full sense of the productivity for this type of farming.

It helps that Jack is selling to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s fabled restaurant. But Blue Hill is only one of many buyers Jack needs to satisfy at a price that consumers and restaurants can pay. To meet Jack and view the greenhouse and farm visit the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.

Additional Reading

Green Roofs in Boston

Giant Greenhouses Mean More Flavorful Tomatoes

Agsquared Online Toolkit for Farm Planning

Generally, the model for solar systems effectively requires you to pay your electric bill 25 years in advance. But that doesn’t really make sense.

In this program the system is leased to us for $87.00 per month plus $16.00 per month for the meter. That’s never going to change. Essentially you lock in your electric use at 50% of what it now costs and push it out 20 years.  Will rates go up? More than likely. In that case we’ll really be in great shape.

One issue with this system is that there is no storage. We feed directly into the grid and draw from the grid. If there is any overage it becomes a part of the grid. So far, about 20% of our power is going out to the grid each month.

In fact, we haven’t had a negative month yet. At first, it was hard to sort out what happens with surplus production, but now we understand that we accumulate credits for repairs or modifications.

This is residential rather than a program for businesses.  Basically we have zero dollars in—plus the $110 cost of conduit from the house to the unit.  (Well, actually we ended up building a barn rather than a freestanding structure for the panels. If I’m going to build something, I want to get some other utility out of it.)

This program is funded on money collected from utility bills—each customer could check that you want to support renewable energy. Something like $200 million was collected over five years. Now the money is being pushed into the general fund for the State of Connecticut.  But there is still time to apply.

Read More on Renewable Energy Programs

30% Tax Credit for Renewable Energy Systems

Solar Energy Systems for Qualifying Connecticut Homeowners

Franklin Hiram King. You may not know the name, but you know the legacy: More than 100 years ago King invented the cylindrical silo.

It was King’s aversion to waste — something that any farmer can appreciate — that led him to create a new way of storing corn.

Until King, grain was held in rectangular buildings that had to be incredibly strong to support tons of weight and pressure. Rectangular buildings used up valuable land, and yet they waste space (those corners rarely get filled).

Wall and roof joints admit moisture, rodents and insects that led to rot and spoilage.

In fact, even today, the lack of proper storage facilities in India leads to the loss of 10 per cent of the total foodgrain production—in a country where hunger still claims the lives of a million children every year.

But the cylindrical silo has just two joints, is airtight and therefore easier to fumigate, and seals the harvest safely away from the elements.

Silos also put gravity to work. So, no need to use equipment to push grain into a corner, and no need to use a machine to load it onto a truck either. Both problems are easily solved when you load from the top and unload from the bottom.

A modern marvel and distinctly American invention, the cylindrical silo is a form so beautiful that some say Frank Lloyd Wright used it as inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum.

SOS—Save Our Soil

King has another legacy that may have an even bigger impact in the 21^st century.

King studied soil fertility and soil depletion, first at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (where he started a department of agricultural physics) and then later at the USDA.

He saw that the use of chemical fertilizers, just becoming popular, “cannot be considered indefinitely.” In just three generations, they were depleting the soil of a nutrient base that had built up over millennia.

King urged that the same amount of nutrients that are taken out of the land be put back in. That’s the definition of sustainable agriculture, and a practice universally accepted by all types of farmers.

His insights came from a nine-month study of farmers in Asia, including China, Japan and Korea. At the time Asian farmers protected fertility by incorporating every bit of waste back into their fields including “human waste, ashes from the cooking fire, muck from ditches, any scrap of food for humans or livestock.”

King’s resulting book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, may have launched the sustainable and organic agricultural movements in this country and Europe.

While many of the methods that King described are no longer used in Asia, farmers I talk to today are embracing age-old methods, even plowing with oxen, to keep costs down and to create food with great flavor.

From Farmers of Forty Centuries

“Time is a function of every life process as it is of every physical, chemical and mental reaction. The husbandman is an industrial biologist and as such is compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time requirements of his crops.

The oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond all others. He utilizes the first and last minute and all that are between . . .

They have long realized that much time is required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible.

By planting in hills and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops growing upon the same field at one time, but in different stages of maturity, one nearly ready to harvest, one just coming up, and the other at the stage when it is drawing most heavily upon the soil. By such practice, with heavy fertilization, and by supplemental irrigation when needful, the soil is made to do full duty throughout the growing season.”

More Reading

Farmers of Forty Centuries

Franklin Hiram King: Farmer For Future Centuries

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

Turns out that milk from grass-fed cows has significantly more of something called conjugated linoleic acid (which may create insulin resistance in the body) than grain-fed cows. Some researchers will add that cows fed on grass are just plain healthier. Cows may love grain but it’s not great as a steady diet.

Smart farmers don’t just turn animals loose on pastureland; they follow a process called rotational grazing.

Goats Are Your Offensive Line

Jen Dustin and her husband, Phil Leahy, of Leahy Farm in Lee, Massachusetts, will tell you that Step One is clearing brush, especially the invasive species. This is most efficiently done with goats—nature’s own brush-clearing machinery. They’ll eat the bark right off the trees if you’re not careful.  Only when the goats have cleared up overgrown fields will Jen and Phil bring in their cows.

Phil makes sure that his herd of Milking Devons only spends a couple of days on any one area of pasture, so they’re always on fresh grass.

Like a gardener working on a massive scale, he knows that when you cut back a plant—as grazing does naturally—it stimulates growth.  The pastures are more productive, the animals healthier and the milk they produce is apparently more nutritious and tastier. And if the cows don’t nibble the grass all the way down to the ground, they are less likely to ingest parasites, which would require medical intervention.

It’s more work to do rotational grazing; Phil and Jen are constantly moving electric fences powered off a car battery. They’re fortunate to have enough land to feed their herd. But many farmers are limited by acreage in how they feed their animals.  Grain becomes a necessity or a supplement if pasture is limited.

Helping the Farmer Next Door

Do you live next to a farmer raising animals for dairy or meat? Do you have open land that is lying fallow? Consider leasing that land to your neighbor. You’ll get a nice tax break, a nominal cash payment and fresh meat and dairy. And the inevitable manure factor can be mitigated when a right-sized herd is moved frequently.

More Reading

Baloney Science on the Perils of Meat

Grass-Fed Beef from Pasture to Plate