06/13/2026
We are very excited to say the least. We took a large step and commitment in ensuring food security and to our customers they will have the highest quality and cleanest food anywhere in the state. We bought a baler to do our own feed. One of the biggest and most expensive struggles in producing livestock and food for the community is feed. You either buy it in or produce it. It didnât make much sense for us to do it on our own until we got to needing over 200 hay bales a year plus needing dairy quality feed for the dairy cows. Here in the south âdairy quality feedâ is just about nonexistent. Not that people donât know what that means or know what quality is, but I think the climate of the regions has shaped the mentality towards winter feed. See in the north animals will live in a barn for Atleast half a year. And quality of feed will make or break an animal in that time. Itâs imperative they found solutions to making the highest quality feed they can produce. In the south we have a 4 month winter and not any snow cattle ranchers here it seems have leaned more into the âmake as much as cheap as you canâ because they arenât confined for over half the year and cattle can maintain and donât lose too much condition in 4 months on decent hay. I have been driving 1.5 hours one way to find something close to quality dairy feed for the winter. Our feed expenses in the winter were upwards to $12,000 and we feed less hay then most. Even with Supplementing grazing on planted winter pastures and getting off hay march 1st itâs a staggering number. We also are limited to the quality we have access to, whatâs in it and how itâs produced. when you are feeding dairy cows I donât need them to maintain I need them to stay fat and produce the same amount of milk every day which is hard enough when there plenty of fresh grass. This baler will give us the ability to do baleage or dry hay and we can say for certain how good our feed is doing feed analysis, testing nutritional value we can plant necessary forages for optimal energy and protein and it certainly wont be sprayed with any chemicals. That is food security for us for you and an unmatched quality to the meat and milk. Was it a large expense yes is it more work yes but I think in the long run itâs better then buying in all our feeds. when you start putting dollars to milk Iv seen decent hay drop milk production over night by 50% thatâs not something I like to leave up to someone else when itâs my animals health, the communities food and my pocket if I can help it. Also went and bought an old John Deere 4020 roughly 110hp engine this old machine is a beast that will help us pull the baler and cutter through heavy cover crop baleage. I can say they do not make tractors like they use to
