All plants produce potential fodder and obviously some are way better than others. Growing with an eye to this is a really good idea. This piece is in country able to support bananas which is certainly not the North West. However, Chokos certainly can be grown here and their productivity makes them excellent feed while using your fence rows to support vines.
This is a reminder that most waste space on farms and that we do not think in terms of simply producing high volume fodder to be eaten immediately. Yet that is the big reason we need animals.
This type of fodder is easily harvested as well unlike hay or grains.
8 Abundant “Fodder Forest” plants, and how to use them
June 14, 2018 by Kate Martignier & filed under Animal Forage, Design, Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Livestock, Plant Systems
This morning when I went to feed the animals I thought I’d
start with collecting some pigeon pea for our horse, Trippy, and see
what I could find for the pigs in the fodder forest while I was there.
Our fodder forest is a small beginning in my long-term goal to reduce
and ultimately eliminate our dependence on fossil fuel-based
agriculture. It’s an area roughly an eighth of an acre, planted in rows
separated by paths.
Here’s a list of the plants we’ve found most useful in our fodder forest so far, along with how they’re used:
- Pigeon pea
Goats, horses and cattle eat the leaves; the small twigs are dropped for mulch, and the older wood is good on the fire.
I
don’t currently make use of the peas other than to spread the seed
around in other areas, but chooks would eat them, and people can eat
them too, cooked similarly to any other dry bean.
(Pigeon pea is a legume and fixes nitrogen in the soil. We also plant
it as a windbreak / nursery plant for young fruit trees elsewhere on
our property. I prune it regularly to keep it bushy, dropping the
prunings as mulch. When the fruit trees get big and start to crowd out
the pigeon pea, we’ll chop and drop the leaves and small branches, and
take the trunks and large branches as firewood.)
2. Queensland arrowroot
Chooks
(chickens, for non-Australians), ducks, cattle, goats, pigs and horses
can all eat the foliage (cattle and goats LOVE it); pigs like the stems
and love the bulbs at the bottom of the stem.
We eat the bulbs too. Harvested small, they can be cooked in many
different ways (our favorite is deep fried in lard or tallow).
The
stems and leaves of arrowroot make great mulch, and it’s a plant that
can go up quickly (assuming adequate moisture and warmth) to make a low
windbreak or shelter belt for smaller, more delicate plants.
3. Comfrey
All permaculture farmers, I think, know and love comfrey. It’s a
valuable fodder for all livestock but for us in particular it serves the
poultry and pigs. Bees love its flowers.
It’s also a dynamic accumulator, mining minerals from down deep and
depositing them in the mulch layer if you chop and drop its leaves.
My goal is to have comfrey everywhere that I want to build soil –
under the fruit trees, near the veggie gardens, and everywhere that I
grow animal fodder.
4. Sweet potato vines
Everybody loves sweet potatoes. We and the pigs eat the tubers. Horses, cattle, goats and pigs all eat the vines.
The
vines cover the ground as a beautiful living mulch and weed
suppressant. And they grow under most other things, so in a sense, they
take up no space. They have to be discouraged from climbing and choking
young trees, but this is also an opportunity to harvest a tub full of
them, to take to the pigs.
They
can be grown in a raised area, or along a road side or path, and the
vines cascading over the edge or snaking out across the path are easy to
cut off and take to the animals as fodder.
5. Nasturtiums
Are
beautiful to look at, their flowers grace our salads and their leaves
are good in salads too, losing their peppery sting when they meet up
with the salad dressing. Their leaves also feed our chooks, and they
cover the ground and suppress weeds.
They
sometimes try to take over, and when that happens I find a thick base
of a vine and cut through it, so that the vines die down and provide
mulch and ample seed for the next flush of round green leaves and jewel
bright flowers.
6.Chokos
Chokos,
growing up the fence around the fodder forest, are another super
provider for us. We eat the vine tips and the smallest nut sized chokos
in salads. We eat egg-to-small-avocado-sized chokos and we feed the
large old tough chokos to the pigs.
Pigs also eat the vines, and the vines also can be easily pulled down
from where they’ve spread too far or too thickly, and used as mulch.
7.Bananas
Besides
the obvious benefit of, well, bananas, this plant has a myriad of other
uses for us. Cattle and goats eat the leaves and trunks. The trunks can
be used to fill the bases of raised garden beds.
Bananas
are planted in our second small fodder forest down slope from our large
manure composting bins, to mop up moisture and nutrients escaping from
there and to provide shade to the bins to keep the composting worms
happy.
Bananas: Pigs, goats, cattle, poultry and people can all eat bananas in various ways and in various stages of ripeness.
Horses, cattle and goats love the very nutritious foliage, and pigs
eat it too. The chooks clean up the berries that the kids miss.
The trees grow in any shape you want – in our case, low and spread
out to provide shade and habitat for the chooks, climbing opportunities
for kids, and ease of reach for collecting berries, and pruning off
foliage for fodder.
Harvest as maintenance
Maintaining our fodder forest is a simple matter – I just harvest from it.
When
a path becomes obstructed with excess growth from the rows either side
of it, it’s time to harvest something from it, to widen the path again.
While I’m in there harvesting, I usually also do some chopping and
dropping, and some weeding and dropping, to add to the mulch on the
rows.
And
that’s it. It’s really “harvest as maintenance,” which is the only kind
of garden maintenance that is likely to be sustainable in the long term
so long as I am the main maintenance person.
My harvest this morning
So, now that you’ve met our fodder forest, back to my harvest this morning.
I
pushed my way into the path between beds that most needed widening, and
stripped leaves from the pigeon pea branches that were obstructing the
path, into Trippy’s feed bin. Then I pruned the stripped branches off
and chopped them into the mulch on the bed.
Next,
something for the pigs. I cast my eye about and spotted a huge choko
that had fallen from the vine that climbs along the fodder forest fence.
That would make a good start.
Five minutes later I was on my way back to the animals, with Trippy’s
pigeon pea leaves in a bin in one hand, a bin full of large chokos and
excess choko vine for the pigs in the other hand, and three smaller,
tender chokos in my pockets for our dinner tonight.
The whole harvest took about 10 minutes. Tomorrow, I’ll widen the next path.
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