Jim Dauven wrote:

[...]

Have you looked into no-till farming?
It's working very well for us on a smallish scale, just to feed ourselves.

-dir

I have planned on using no-till farming with horse drawn
equipment. First I would run the disk harrow behind a two
horse team. That's two acres an hour for 5 hours. Change
horses (you cannot/should not run a horse more than 5 hours)
because the need time for foraging. Then run disk harrow
for another five hours. That way you can disk up 20 acres
a day. The next day run the spring tooth harrow for the
same about of time. (It actually may go faster as the
spring tooth harrow doesn't have the resistance to pulling
that the disk harrow does). Last run the grain drill for
the planting of wheat, oats, barley, rapeseed etc. These
plants are winter planting so you plant them in late september
and let them germinate in the fall rain so they will get
good start for the spring. That way the plant matures while
the moisture from the spring rains is still in the ground.

If you are raising cattle and you keep your cattle in a corral
in the winter you can use a manure spreader to spread manure
on the grain crops in the spring just as ground if thawing
This will provide additional nitrogen for the growing grain
plants. (The object of this is to get the grain as
healthy as possible for increased yield)

Also the rape oil is important here because after fertilization
of the grain heads if you spray the grain with rapeseed oil that
will kill many of the pests like grass hoppers as rapeseed oil
is toxic and does really dry out.

I don't have a horse drawn spray rig yet but it is one of the
things that will have to be constructed.

Crops that you will irrigate, Corn, potatoes, beans, peas,
onions, alfalfa, etc you plant in the spring. One trick you
can do is seed alfalfa over the grain crop that you planted
the fall before. The grain will grow faster than the alfalfa
but the alfalfa will still grow and the plant root nodules will
fix nitrogen into the soil for the grain. You do the same
no till harrow work but then you use a cultivator to make
up the rows. After planting you can then lay the soaker
tubes for a water supply.

Again after these crops have fertilized then a mist of
rapeseed oil will help in pest control.

I have herd that a mist of rapeseed oil will also control
pests on fruit and berries.

So you can see why I am very interested in the rapeseed plant
in a TEOTWAWKI scenario.

The Independent

The Independent

A man with a good supply of horses (6) should be able to
plant 180 to 200 acres of grain crops in the fall and an
additional
up the rows for the planting for crops



Why do you need to grow so much stuff? We can live on a quarter acre
apiece and that includes veggies, grain, oilseeds, bush/cane/vine fruits,
legumes, sugar plants, and fiber plants.

A simple planting stick is all you need, and something sharp to cut the
weeds off at the base.


Seems to me that you only have to have the tractor and horses in order
to grow enough crops to 'feed' both of them.

As for raising large animals, that's an incredible amount of work. I
would rather eat veggies and kick back.

Why feed animals 10# of food to get 2# back? And ALL that water and care
and shelter and fencing and herding and on and on and on.

I don't think you can do the above, Jim, without a pretty good size work
force of people that are not equal partners. That tend the animals and
eat turnips, so to speak. An underclass.

Americans couldn't eat animal products at every meal now, if their food
supply wasn't subsidized by cheap labor, here and abroad.


-dir

--
The greatest fine art of the future will be the making
of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.

Abraham Lincoln