From Soy to Livestock: How a New Forage Mix is Increasing Farm Revenue and Preparing for Corn Cultivation"
2 May 242m 2s

In a move to diversify and optimize land usage for better profitability, Kelly is implementing a new forage crop mix as part of his intensive grazing plan.

00:05 Today's a big day. We're putting in the forage crop mix, the first portion of it anyway, on our intensive grazing. 00:12 We, uh, we're out here today. It's a 79 pound per acre mix, 64 pounds of oats, 15 pounds of peas. 00:19 Uh, worked on this through TE and Toler Customs. Our cover crop seed dealer, my good friend Austin Te and Toler. 00:24 We will come back the 1st of June and there's about eight different species of plants that we're gonna put in at that time in our warm season mix. 00:31 This is more of our cold season mix. Very excited about this, but my sons and I made this decision to try to do, expand our cow herd 00:38 to use this land for something more profitable than soybeans. I've said before, soybeans weren't 00:42 profitable for us last year. We sure don't think soybeans are gonna be profitable in 2024, but the cows, however, are profitable. 00:48 We made the decision to do this, to try to do something different with our acres that can have a better ROI Reds out here today putting us in 00:55 things are working pretty well. You know, we kind of remodeled this drill a little bit because we're having more than one species 01:00 of seed in there, things like that. We wanted to make sure the drilled work appropriately. It sure seems like it's coming out okay. 01:05 I was a little worried about that 'cause you can't set the drill for just one kind of seed, 01:09 but it sure seems to be working well. We're gonna hope to get up to three cows per acre with the species we're putting it on. 01:15 Austin and I worked pretty extensively on that. Currently with our bro pasture, we run about one cow for every acre and a half. 01:21 So to go from one cow on every acre and a half to three cows on an acre, well that's four or five x of what we're doing now. 01:28 That would sure be exciting if this would, would turn out that way. And then, you know, we're gonna run this 01:32 for probably a couple years and then we'll go back to corn and we'll move these acres to another spot. 01:37 The soil health benefits for the resulting corn yield, uh, following this, I think will be pretty tremendous. 01:42 And I think there's several benefits to doing this, but we'll have to stay tuned to see how it turns out. We're, we're kind of making it up as we go along, 01:48 but with Austin's help, I'm pretty optimistic. Thank you. Red, how's the ice cream bar?

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