A followup Q to Larry's corn grinding post

We simply don't have corn cribs in our area, never have.

If I leave a bird feeder out and put grain in it within a week I'll have birds, squirrels, rats, raccoons, foxes, coyotes and every other darn animal that eats grain tearing it apart and eating the spilled grain on the ground. We have to keep our feed in old deep freezers to keep the animals out.

How can you leave corn in an open crib like that? Why do the animals leave it alone?

They don't leave it alone. I had a couple of cribs filled on a pretty much abandoned farmstead. They were the steel mesh cribs. The deer had all the corn stripped off the cobs as high up as they could reach standing on their hind legs. In the grand scheme of things,it's not a lot of loss. They only take what they can get off the outside,there's a lot more in there.

What about squirrels? Is the mesh tight enough to keep them out? Regular filling of a feeder results in 10-50 squirrels here, if you keep it full you'll be at 50 within a couple of weeks and they will soon be gnawing holes in your house.

Kids with 22?

For you guys that are grinding to feed steers, whats your formula? Are you hand feeding ground ear corn, or is it going in a self feeder? Mixing molasses in for dust control? Lets hear some formulas.

I have a crib like that too. I feel like I have a big animal feeder out there. I have added wire to it where in some spots they have to go through 3 layers to get to it. I have put electric fence around it. About all I have done is kept the deer out. I can go out there sometimes during the middle of the day and there is a big group of piegons that will all be hanging on the side eating. I have shot a few but then I figure I'm putting lead into my cattle feed not to mention running it through my grinder mixer. It drives me nuts.

Squirrels really don't eat that much. Biggest problem I have with tree rats, is when they crawl up in the blower of the grinder mixer, and die.
My wife does a pretty good job of keeping them cleaned out with her 410.

I just grind it without adding anything most of the time. I add oats when I have them,but for the most part I feed the oat mixed stuff to calves in the creep feeder. After the calves are weaned I go maybe 10% oats,90% corn until the oats are used up. I unload it on the floor of the bunker silo then load it back up in the silage cart and mix it with corn silage.

Funny you mention that, our long time friend and neighbor had the same kind of bin, way back when, but his location, the fact that deer were not that abundant, I don't even recall birds being a problem, but now, all would likely be trouble.

When looking back, there was little habitat for deer in this area, even with the hilly terrain, those farmers used all of the land in some way and it was cleared, so just hedge rows, a single line of trees was all that was there, we used to get huge flocks of starlings, but where his was, closer to the road and the house, someone being there all the time, probably little to no pilferage. I did not see many squirrels then, they were only in the wooded areas which was a safe distance, funny how the landscape has changed, now its chock full of wildlife, darned mice would be a huge problem unless the base was flashed with metal to keep them from climbing and out, which I assume these are built to do just that. Squirrels will take the outside rows clean of corn depending on how long its left, same with grackles and starlings, I have seen first hand how much they can reduce a yield, problem is farmer has to wait for moisture to get down, so that gives them time. My long time farmer friend used to take losses, especially in my field, 3-4 rows on the outside being cleaned out, eventually the deer would start in on it too, but they seem to be not so bad as the other critters, unless the crop is left standing longer or over the winter. The one large operator here has some huge bins and I assume a dryer, but many do not, so if the weather or conditions extend the harvest too long the critters will take their share, even more so in fields bounded by woods, like is common here, not so common going back to the 50's when everything was cleared. They get their cut before it even gets to a bin or the combine gets to it.

I like seeing what Larry posts in regards to the neighbors farm and activities, they do a lot of different things, nice vegetable patches, livestock and similar, you don't see farms like this, smaller ones, doing diverse things and providing for ones self, close family or friends, nice to see these kinds of posts.

I used to grind in an old steel wheel triple box, 2/3 ear corn, 1/3 oats, add 50 lbs mineral, and 10 lbs viamin ADE, heaped full, probably weighed a ton. Fed twice a day and then good mixed hay and salt and mineral block, fresh water, my steers always did good.

My friend grinds ear corn and oats if he has them, and adds minerals at a certain ratio to it. We feed it to both heifers and steers.

One bale of second cutting run through the grinder. Per Batch
About 400# of shelled corn dumped in.
50# of Puriena 42.
The rest is eared corn through a 1/2 inch screen.
My grinder holds about 2 ton.
I feed it out of a self feeder, they eat what they want, when they want.
I have a feed bunk also and I dump a little mineral along with a little feed and enough Puriena 42 where they average 1# per day per steer.
Free choice on first cutting hay.
When the steers and the wild life finsh off my eared corn, I run shelled corn through the grinder with no screen. Then about 3 bales of good second cutting per batch.
I use to add liguid molasas at the elevator in the old days. But had no good way to do it after I started grinding my own.

I always used cribs, not really that much waste, if the corn got over a year old you could tell the outside started to look a little picked over. I have never owned a bin, always picked and cribbed and then shelled what we sold, use a Moline sheller. Picked with a Oliver 73-H and gravity boxed, a good system for the old days. Let mother nature do the drying.

Husband always cribbed our corn... some in a round wire crib, some in a double sided wood crib.

Don't recall that we had too many troubles - or he'd have been after critters with a vengeance.

Did have a couple squirrels that go lead poisoning after dragging numerous ears out of the side slots which used to be in the old wood crib for accessing corn for feeding in the old days. Husband even said he didn't mind if they ate a little bit - but they were just dragging ears around the yard and leaving them lay.

My small crib has square hardware type cloth/screen lining the inside,between the studs and the wooden slats/siding , maybe 1/4 inch squares, it even keeps the mice out ! The guy who built it did a great job on it, I bought it at auction and moved it to my farm several years ago.

The deer, squirrels, rats, and raccoons will eat the corn. Sometimes it gets really bad in the middle of winter and deer will pull entire ears out. So to minimize the damage we put chicken wire around our cribs, also orange snow fence, or the older snow fence made of wire and wooden lath. Last year we put round bales around the cribs, which worked until the deer learned to jump on top of the bales, stand on their hind legs, and eat well above the orange snow fencing. They can all make a mess, especially if corn is kept in to the summer. Some of it we just figure as "drying cost" since we aren't combining it and burning LP like everyone else. Some years you can keep up on it really well and have practically no loss, and other years we have 30-40 deer on the yard every night. I agree there was more habitat around here years ago for deer, so they weren't so concentrated, and the deer population has increased substantially from years ago...

Ken,

Squirrel is a fine meal. I had plenty that when brined, were very delicious!

D.

Around here most of the older wooden corn cribs were out away from other building usually in a field and they were built off the ground like houses at the beach.Then metal collars were put on the posts and if the weeds were kept down the rats and mice couldn't get to the grain and in the middle of a field there wasn't much cover for them either usually kept cats or a dog ratter around them.I'm thinking of building one over in a back field and letting it double as a tree stand for deer and coyotes.

95 bushel mix -
-30% barley
-15% oats
-55% ear corn
-25 lb mineral
Fed at 5-7 lb/hd/day, free choice straight alfalfa baleage. It puts the # on em.

Another, "funny you mention that". The old farmstead at the end of what was a dirt road, across the then swamp, now pond/small lake, from us was a typical small family farm with the farm house, huge hay barn, bank barn with the ramp on one side and stanchion stall dairy below and out on grade beyond the barn. There were all kinds of out buildings, and what you said brings back old memories. There were 2 distinct buildings with projecting walls, not square enough to be diamonds, walls longer than the roof, each distant from each other, away from the rest of the farm, in the middle of a field. Obviously corn cribs, even had the diamond shaped portal window in the front of each. They were the last of the buildings that stood, wish I had photos of the whole farm, these 2 little buildings I never knew what they were for, until years later. Darned kids burned the house, then the barn later, not sure about the other out buildings. I found the place on an old aerial photo of this area taken in 1952, and there they were besides the rest of the farm, 2 wooden corn crib buildings. This old place was cool, back when rural meant rural, the road was dirt and the telephone poles had glass insulators, going into the 80's was a forgotten little place amongst what was changing, time kind of forgot about this place.

40 years ago when corn cribs still popular most farmers kept several feral cats around for varmit control. Rat terriors were popular too, my Grandpa had one as like me he didn't like cats very much. Coons and squirrels will not hang around where they can smell cat urine.