Jeff Gaye
“Tired of Mother Nature kicking my ass feeding cows.”
That was the Google search that led Scott Fettes to a continuous-rotation indoor fodder system.
Fettes raises upwards of 200 head at his operation near Gladmar. “Five years ago now we were in kind of a drought down here,” he said. “We can never produce enough feed for our cattle. We're always buying,”\
“We're buying hay out of Manitoba all the time and always scrounging to find feed. So I Googled 'tired of Mother Nature kicking my ass feeding cows,' and this is what popped up—that’s the honest truth.”
Fettes now operates a Fodder Tech system year-round and harvests a tonne of fresh fodder per day. He also sells the systems to other interested producers.
Fettes’ fodder system is housed in a 13-by-60-foot grow room in a 40-by-60 steel building. He sets up seven-and-a-half-foot grow trays with seed barley, and an automatic system keeps them watered. There is no soil involved.
The seed is first soaked overnight, drained, and laid in at one pound per foot, or seven and a half pounds per tray.
“We usually leave it to soak overnight, drain it in the morning and then we'll feed it into the trays the following night. That’s our normal schedule,” Fettes said.
“But it's not like milking cows, where you have to do it at four o'clock and four o'clock. If you’ve got a hockey game to go to with the kids, whenever it works, we get it done. And then we put the seed in the trays from there.”
The barley grows for seven days. The fodder is mostly root mass, with about a foot of stalk. It will typically yield six pounds of barley for each pound of seed, but Fettes says he has harvested as much as ten-to-one.
“When it's a week old, we just grab it by the green and pull it out. It just slides right out of the tray,” Fettes said.
“We have our trays set up so we can lift up a garage door, and our tractor is parked on the other side. We throw that mat right into the bucket of the tractor and then we just drive out into our corral and dump it on the ground, and the cattle pick it up from there.”
The size of the system is variable. Fettes’ system has seven racks of 28 trays in constant rotation so he’s seeding a rack every day and harvesting a rack every day.
The water enters the trays from the bottom to discourage mould. Keeping the temperature and the humidity in the desirable range is the key to both production and mould prevention.
“You've got to keep the room at a certain temperature rate of between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you want to keep it under 65 per cent humidity,” Fettes said. The plants generate some of their own warmth as they grow, so that helps with the temperature.
Fettes said the system has had a big impact on dealing with feed availability and cost at his operation.
“The first two years we were at it, we had 200 hay bales carryover—and we have never had carryover,” he said. “We always had to buy feed, it was it was just how much we were going to buy.”
They carried over another 200 bales in each of two years for a total of 400.
“This year it was even a crappier summer trying to get feed, so I don't know if we're going to end up with any carryover this spring,” Fettes said. “But we are feeding a lot more cattle. Normally we sell some bred females and whatnot in the fall, but with everybody short of feed, nobody wanted to buy any.
“So since we had this, we just thought we’d grow more fodder and get them through the spring and then we'll sell some pairs in the spring, hopefully, when it starts raining and people want to buy. It completely opens a lot more options.”