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Innovative planting and cropping strategies are helping Pennsylvania dairy producer Ben Peckman weather the storm of high fertilizer and other input costs.
Fertilizer, water and other input costs are skyrocketing. To combat these costs, you need a forage field with maximum forage quality. Enter: forage sorghum. Forage sorghum will save you A LOT of money, and University studies prove sorghum offers forage quality comparable to corn.
For those who know me well, especially my husband, they would not list decisiveness as one of my strong qualities. At the risk of sounding cliché, the typical sitcom-couple restaurant situation plays out in our household on a regular basis and extends beyond restaurants to weeknight meal planning.
Small-grain forages should be considered as a win-win situation. Dairy farmers “win” as a cover crop, early spring or fall source of forages, decrease in soil erosion, an opportunity to incorporate manure in late spring and early fall, and extending the growing season capturing more solar energy per acre.
Double-cropping with both warm- and cool-season forages in New York can have many benefits, including providing a source of forage yield in the spring that potentially leads to greater total season yields than a monocrop system, increasing rotation diversity, and providing year-round soil cover.
Failure to control the feed bill can erode ranch profits very quickly, even to the point of bankruptcy. The most economical feed is normally forage standing in the pasture.
