Last week we learned of a program that rescues produce from being thrown away. For $10 a person can get a box of produce that weighs up to 60 pounds! Even better-for a $100 annual membership you're entitled to go each week for one of those boxes! We bought the annual membership and even though distribution points are a bit over an hour away for us, we go to that area enough to make it worthwhile. We'll use some for our own eating and feed the rest to our animals. Hay is getting so expensive that we've got to find a better solution. Hay was about $8 a bale 3 years ago when we got our first goats. The last 6 bales Tony bought were over $20 each! With a cow that eats 4 flakes a day, and 3 goats that eat 1 each per day, that's about $10 a day just to feed them!! Moving to our new house will help-we have 2 pastures there that we can use for grazing, and they can rotate so that one doesn't get overly grazed, but even if we can start on that this week, it'll be 6 weeks minimum before either field is ready for animals.
Do you have any special programs in your area that make use of food that would otherwise be taken to the dump? If you have farm animals, how do you keep feed costs manageable?
My town is too small for anything like that.Half the time our tiny little grocery store is out of food so there is no throwing any away! That is a good program though. I ma planning on planting some crops for animal feed..like black oil sunflower for the chickens and some extra kale.The prices of feed and hay are just too high!
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