How do you farm?

[bigbluegrass]

I have a 52 acre farm which I own. Right now I have only 5 cows. I am going to AI them this year and hopefully do that every year from here out so I can get rid of the bull. Most of the land is wooded with only about 10 acres cleared right now. I am working to clear most of the remaining land. Some day I hope to have 20 or more cows on this place. I do rotationally graze the land in the spring, summer and fall. In the winter I feed purchased hay with a bale graze system. Some year I am going to figure out how to rotation graze all winter. The past two years I have sold all our calves direct from the farm to neighbors and family as beef. I take them to the butcher and they pick them up. Right now the hanging weights are between 400# and 500# at 14 to 24 months. I am hoping with AI to be able to jump that up using better bulls.

Interesting reading all your posts!

[Nesikep]

Well, around our place, we're pretty much all on benchland about 300 ft above the Fraser river, Most people just sell hay or raise cattle, the biggest have about 100 head, we have 23. We are set up to grow vegetables and grain, but don't have markets to make it worthwhile anymore. We used to grow an acre of carrots and a couple acres of squash, an acre of onions as well as potatoes. Our place used to be an apple orchard that supplied Buckingham Palace with apples in the 40's... There are 3 of those trees left. If you travel 30 miles north, you have the Diamond S ranch, which runs 600 head I think, and if you go further away, you have other big ranches such as the Douglas Lake ranch (owned by Walmart!!!), The Gang Ranch (I believe it's North America's largest ranch), the Chezacut ranch (we were dreaming of buying it years ago). These larger ranches have square miles of deeded land, and 100's of square miles of range.