Grain sorghum, oats, alfalfa, and sweet sorghum are fed to the animals, while the wheat is sold. Much of the soybeans and sunflowers will be run through an oilseed press for oil fuel, with the leftover meal fed to animals. So, roughly three-fourths of the crop acreage is devoted to animal feed and cattle grazing, overlapping with that for oilseed and leguminous nitrogen fixation. This cropland fraction for livestock, with return of manure to the crops, is a common practice on organic farms. We have a cow-calf beef herd based on nine Texas longhorn cows rotationally grazed on the pasture by use of electric polywire.
Longhorns are the closest U.S. domestic cattle breed analogous to bison.
They are an appropriate breed in regard to the energy accounting for the Sunshine Farm because they require fewer inputs than other breeds. They have been on this continent the past 500 years, where natural selection worked on unbranded and drifting survivors on the Texas and Mexican range and on the long trail drives through the Great Plains. Egg production is done by a portable hen house with 45 Rhode Island Red hens fenced in so that they also compost old straw for return to the cropland. With a portable broiler pen and a borrowed chicken plucker, we raise and butcher 75 Cornish Cross broilers annually. The broilers and hens are demonstration projects with data collected for the energy accounting.