How our Fodder System works. Tips and tricks to grow fodder

foreign is going to give you a brief explanation of our clotter here this fodder system we plant barley in each of these trays and then it's a seven day cycle to get to this growth we have right here quite a few inches of this really nice green grass and again this is barley seed that we've grown here really nice root based when we mix this in with our Alfalfa the cows absolutely love it you can use it as a supplement feed or a full feed to all your mother cows this barley with the fodder system here uses about 90 percent less water and all the watering systems you can kind of see them up in the back here we've ordered four times a day from about three to four minutes depending on the quality of seed that we have and all the water from this room gets piked underneath and goes out to one of our irrigated Fields so it's all recycled water once it passes through this water system and a system like this in this room here this can replace about a 200 acre field of alfalfa each year so if you don't have the land or if it's a low water year this water system is a great way to feed all your cows showing you guys how we Harvest our butter so this rack right here this has been growing for seven days so it's time to pull it out and do as I just reach in here like this get over it lay your belt then it's going to go all the way along just conveyor belt here so that's onto our other one load into that mixer there at the end once we've gotten this whole tray loaded we'll take that mixer feed it straight to our cows hi this is Morgan Lyman again and you see it back here that's all of our father and pain coming out [Music] of that stuff until the cows are all very excited the next step after we have fed and harvested all the fodder is we're going to come in and just spray these trays down then we'll come to the back side of your tray same thing we'll spray all of them out we just want to get all of this junk seed out of it so that when we plant this next weeks all these seeds that didn't germinate or grow we're not leaving them in those trays we get a fresh tray of all new seed get all that old junk out of there you can see the mold on the side of these trays the better throwing conditions you have for fodder the better growing conditions you have for mold you can see it building up there so when it builds up like that we'll just come in with a little um brush or sometimes we even use a power washer just get all that mold out of the sides and bottoms of the trays give us a new fresh Queen tray if you're planning on top of mold your next batch of water is obviously going to have more mold on it but mold is probably the biggest fight we have here growing fodder like I said The more ideal conditions you have for your fodder the more ideal conditions you have for that mold growing you can even see on some of these when we pick it up there's no mold spots on the bottom of this tray all looks really nice and healthy but you can still see on the side of those trays you do get a little bit of the mold so it's just a very normal thing that happens our actual fodder doesn't have any mold very clean great for the animals but you can see on the tray just starting to grow there a little bit The Next Step in the process is to plant the seed so these are the trays that we just harvested from this barley seed and for our system each of these trays here will put out three scoops in just like that our next step after we have all these trays loaded so you take this tool here and you just want to set it right on these little metal bars will catch on the plastic you push it all the way down and through and then spread some butter all throughout the sweet or Express the barley seed all the way down the tray so it's nice and even then when we water it it's a nice straight line it all grows evenly after you have them all spread evenly the next thing we do is we get the same barley seeds but this wheelbarrow is soaked for 24 hours so it's wet it's a little bit thicker we put it on the front of these trays here just like this spread it out we found that if we put wet seed in the front of these trays it stops all that dry seed from getting pushed out and going down the drains and getting wasted so the next thing we do is I come through and just spray all of these trays once we have the wet seed put in this wet seed keeps all the seed from getting pushed to the front and spraying the backseat with water just helps it to start germinate so it'll grow at the same rate this front seat does just get everything wet started germinating and then later today our watering program will kick on and we'll leave it for seven days and come back and harvest it now once we have all of this seed planted it's wet ready to go we're just going to take these white boards slide them in here just like that because all the water when it comes it comes from these back things here you can see a little coming out it'll water for three minutes and come to the front and this is pretty much sealed right here it shouldn't let any seed out just a little water but all that water coming down to the tray underneath it sometimes gets this seed pushes it out waste it it goes down into those drains so if you put these boards here the water just comes down lands here on the board slides off without messing up the tray underneath it so these white boards are made of PVC plastic and we found that they really helped a lot in trying to keep this seed in the trays and not getting it down in the drains foreign

Channel: Warrior Rizen Ranch

Views: 147,193

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Id: MuxcdIZ_Fsk

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023