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Cows spend a lot of time eating. Nutrition is very important in producing milk and keeping cows healthy. At Mercer Vu Farms Inc. we spend a great deal of time and effort in supplying our cows with a high quality ration. Cows are miraculous animals because they can take plants and parts of plants that can not be utilized by humans, and using their unique stomachs, convert them to milk, a product that we all can enjoy the healthy benefits of. When corn is harvested humans can only eat the grain but half of the energy in the corn plant is left in the field. With cows we harvest the whole plant and utilize all of its energy to produce milk. Cows are efficient producers of food. So let’s see how we at Mercer Vu Farms Inc. feed our cows... |
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At Mercer Vu Farms Inc. we grow corn, alfalfa, rye for ryelage and soybeans for our cows to eat. We maximize our land to produce as much forage as we possibly can. We use many different pieces of equipment to harvest these forages. Here we are chopping ryelage that has been mowed and windrowed. We are using a chopper to pick up the windrows, chop the ryelage and blow into dump trucks. |
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The forages are trucked back to our feeding area and stored in bunker silos. The dump truck dumps the feed and we use a tractor to push the feed out and pack it down. We continue this process until the bunker is full. Once the bunker is full we cover it with plastic and hold the plastic down with tire sidewalls. We have several different bunkers to store different forages. This bunker here is 65 feet wide, 240 feet long, 12 feet high and holds 5,500 tons of corn silage. We have storage for over 20,000 tons of forage on our farm. |
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We also buy a large amount of grains and byproducts to supplement the forages. We buy ground corn and soybean meal from local elevators. We also buy some byproducts of human food industries like citrus pulp, which is left over skins and pulp from citrus production, and even chocolate candy which is left over from chocolate production. These products are stored here in our commodity building.
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