Estimating Corn Yield

I've been feeding the pigs a little bit of ear corn. They attack it with great vigor! I thought it would be fun to estimate yield from our little plot. The national yield this year is predicted to be 155.3 bushels per acre. This, of course, is heavily managed hybrid corn. Gene Logsdon got 110 bushels per acre from the Open Pollinated variety "Reids Yellow Dent." I grew Nothstine Dent as I outlined in this blog entry. I picked and shucked corn from a 125 square foot area, it filled a five gallon bucket.

The sacrificed area

5 gallon of ear corn

The best looking ear of the group

A couple were pretty...

The worse

A couple weren't...

Dent corn

Some were drier than others...













Now for the math to figure out bushels per acre. A bushel of shelled corn, corn that is no longer on the cob, weighs about 56 pounds. To get a bushel of shell corn from ear corn, what I have, you need 70 pounds of ear corn. That five gallon bucket weighed 23 pounds.

23 pounds of ear corn equals .328 bushels of shell corn.

.328 bushels per 125 square feet. 125 square feet is .00287 acres.

.328 bushels per .00287 acres.

Time for some algebra:

.328 bushels/.00287 acres = x bushels/1 acre

114 bushels / acre

Pretty respectable for open pollinated if this method of estimating is at all reliable. I imagine I am not acounting for lots of variables. How accurately did I measure the sample area? Not very... How does the moisture content of the corn play into this? I don't know...

Regardless, The numbers suggest this was worth doing. This means I will get about 11.5 bushels of corn. The price of corn today is 4.59 a bushel. Sweet! I raised $53 dollars worth of corn. Of course I spent about twice that on fuel, manure, seed and urea...

These folks a couple hours south me got 60 bushels / acre with Nothstine.

Now this is better corn than from the feed mill. Open pollinated is supposed to be higher in protein than hybrid corn. It is definitely non-GMO. The pigs enjoy it fresh. The nutrients and organic matter from the manure will benefit the soil for many growing season beyond this one. Since it is open pollinated I can reuse seed and I only used a small amount of the urea which I can save for future years. So we will call it a wash... Just like what they found in the movie King Corn! I need to sign up for my subsidy ;)

Maybe I will try this corn yield estimate on a different part of the field on a future date this fall.

On a different note I found this pile of poop near the corn. We have had a black bear sighting near our house recently. Is that what this is?

Bear scat?

Deep Litter Bedding, Week two update

 The pigs have been eating well and leaving lots of waste. The daily chore is to go out and pull the litter away from the electric fence wire and ruffle up the beading as to cover up any poop on the surface. Read about the back ground of trying this bedding system here. This has been working well to cover up the poop smell but I have noticed a growing ammonia smell.

 I decided to dig the manure fork in further and really churn things up. That only made the ammonia smell stronger. Time to hit the Google search engines and see what I could learn. Lots of academic research to read on the subject. Chose not read that, too much like the day job... I found the chicken raising message boards the most encouraging. Ammonia smell is bad. Earthy smell is good. If you smell ammonia you need to add more carbon. I added two bales of straw and fluffed it up really well. We'll see if that helps with the ammonia smell, it sure did initially!

This method of deep litter bedding is more similar to chicken type systems I have read about, adding litter so you end up with a deep litter  The pig systems I have read about seem to focus on starting with a lot of carbon and keeping it fluffed up. I wish I could smell things over the internet to see what these other barns smell like! This blog entry for example!

This is a good clean out story and how he prepares his barn for the next round.

After churning up

Straw touching hot-wire

Churned up, but moist and stinky

New straw on top

Pigs eating corn

Threw the pigs some corn today. They love the fresh green stuff!

Tassel-ears

Went to the corn today to harvest some for the pigs and found this oddity.

Tassel-ear

That is an ear of corn that developed on the tassel at the top of the corn stalk. Apparently it's very rare and has to do with a hormonal imbalance in that plant. Read more here.

Feed Efficiency

The last time we raised pigs in the winter of 2011-2012 we used 12,400 pounds of feed for 13 pigs. That's approximately 950 pound per pig to go from wean to market. It also took them 6 months to go from wean to market. This seems very inneficient! Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs (page 50) by Kelly Klober says that it takes between 650 to 750 pounds to take a pig from 40 pounds to market. Small-scale Pig Raising (page 4) by Dirk van Loon assumes 700 pounds of feed to take a pig from wean to 220 pounds. My pigs dressed out to 180 pounds which means, according to this website, that they had a live weight of approximately 250 pounds. 30 more pounds of gain would take about 100 pounds of feed. Regardless I used 100 to 200 pounds more feed that I should have needed to. Now assuming today's price of .26 per pound for feed, $26 to $54 per pig wasted times 13 pigs equals $338 to $702 wasted. Yikes! Obviously I missed the mark by a long shot so this go around I am making some changes.

So what factors lead to this inefficiency?

1. Home made feeder was letting to much feed out.

2. Pigs were standing in mud while eating so any food that hit the ground was unrecoverable

3. Feeder was not well protected from the elements so excessive food in the trough of the feeder got wet and became unpalatable.

4. Not enough bedding when raising pigs in winter so they shivered off many calories.

Wasteful feeder

In this picture you can see a couple of bad things. First, the pigs standing in the feeder to more easily reach the feed. Sometime after this picture I did put a 6"x6" landscape timber I had sitting around in front of the feeder for them to stand on. Muddy trotters in the feed trough doesn't help the feed stay fresh. Notice all the feed on the ground... and this is when it was still relatively dry out. By this point the pigs have ripped the lids off the feed trough. What a mess.

Homemade pig feeder when new

As you can see in this picture the trough had lids at one point, but the pigs were too rough with them and they ended up getting ripped off. Also note the the giant gap between bottom of the trough and bottom of the storage hopper. This let way too much feed out.

The whole picture

The flip top roof was good for filling but did not provide nearly as much protection as you might think it would!

For this round of pigs I have built a deck for them to stand so they can reach in the feeder easier and be out of the muck. The feeder is now also in the hoop house so the only moisture that can get in the trough is from the pigs bringing their wet snouts from the waterers or from condensation from the tarp that covers the hoop house.

Feeder after modifications

So here it is after modifications. I added a 2 by 6 across the bottom so now the opening is only 1 1/2 inches from the floor of the trough. With it also being 1 1/2" thick it really reduced the feed output. So much so I felt compelled to break out the sawzall and cut out some areas for increased feed to get out. A google search for adjusting pig feeders revealed these reference cards. I wish I had know to search for these earlier! I think my feeder still flows a little too freely. I will keep an eye on it and report back over the coming months. I already see some feed on the decking I built and there is some moisture from the nipple waters, but nothing like it used to be. Time will tell though as the pigs are still small!

One of the advantages of the hoop house is all the bedding involved and the heat from the composting action that should be happening by this winter. By keeping them out of the muck, and this extra warmth I hope to observe an increase in feed efficiency. Here is some research to support my "shivering off the calories" premise.  I discussed the hoop house and straw bedding at length in this blog post.

In addition to these measures I am hoping that the corn we are growing will help offset feed costs as well. It will make it harder to measure feed efficiency but will help reduce the amount of purchased feed to reach market weight.

Now for cute pig pictures...

Rooting below the straw in the deep litter bedding.