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| When I bought my farm in 1989 the first soil test showed organic matter of 0.25%. The farm had been farmed by tenants since 1938 with land owners who had never farmed. I hired it chisel plowed and planted alfalfa with an oats nurse crop. Had a neighbor with a combine harvest the oats that I sold as grain. Baled the oat straw, and sold some of it. After a few years I converted to a 6 year rotation with 3 years of alfalfa (starting with the oats nurse crop), then corn, beans, and corn. The alfalfa and the beans supplied enough nitrogen for decent corn crops. I broke the ground into 6 patches and let each patch fit a year of the rotation so I had all four crops every year, oats, alfalfa, corn, and beans.
Selling alfalfa to individuals was often difficult, a little dust would make horse owners think it was moldy and they would reject it in small squares. I sold single small squares to rabbit owners on occasion. One horse owner took two hay racks, some 160 small bales and rejected but didn't return half of them His check for the other half was bigger than his bank account. His banker said he never had that much cash in the account. With the difficulties in selling small bales and collecting for them, I was depending mostly on the "free" alfalfa nitrogen. One day I looked at the cost of buying nitrogen compared to the fields that had been producing nitrogen and alfalfa to the cash produced by growing corn. Growing corn penciled out to be a lot more profitable than depending on alfalfa to produce that nitrogen. So I built a 32% N applier and planted the alfalfa patches to corn and beans.
My custom combiner fussed about the multiple patches and offered a better price if I did whole farm rotation so I did that and eventually went no till. Since 2008 I've been renting to a strip till tenant 50/50 crop share and some years he makes me more money than I did doing all the work.
A few of the last years of alfalfa I hired big round baling and getting paid for them was better than small squares even though I stored them outside.
Alfalfa wasn't disastrous, but wasn't often very profitable compared to growing corn and beans and selling to horse owners was hard to get paid for the alfalfa bales at times.
The alfalfa did raise the soil organic matter to over 8% and its staying there.
Gerald J. | |
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Alfalfa as Cash Crop
