If you want your homestead to be as self-sufficient as possible, this means having healthy livestock. However, it is difficult to keep them healthy if the grass and plants they eat turn brown during a drought. That's why having these different kinds of feed that can grow in a drought is vital. It may make all the difference and keep your homestead as successful as it can be!
The Livestock Feed That Can Grow In A Drought Includes:
Woody plants provide extra fiber/roughage and can help to settle digestions upset by too much rich food. Their deep roots bring vitamins and minerals up from lower levels of the soil and make them accessible to livestock. In dry years, these deep roots are especially valuable. During the long rainless summer of 2016, when my family ran drip irrigation on the gardens 24/7 and watched the pastures turning brown, the deep-rooted trees and bushes remained green and growing.
Goats are champion brush-eaters, and they naturally prefer browsing to grazing. Feeding lots of branches gets enough fiber into their systems to settle their digestions. Sheep also enjoy a certain amount of browse.
What Can You Feed?
Willow and mulberry are particularly nutritious high-protein feeds. They can grow very rapidly in favorable conditions, which makes them easy to coppice for continual growth. Siberian peashrub is a hardy legume with protein-rich leaves and seedpods. It’s supposed to cope well with drought, poor sandy soil and other challenging conditions.Other palatable trees and shrubs include apple, birch , staghorn sumac ( do not ever feed your animals poison sumac, Toxicodendron vernix), rose, blackberry (also has some disinfectant and digestion-settling properties) and raspberry (beneficial to animals during pregnancy and soon after birth, and will do no harm at other times). Do not feed branches from stone fruit trees (peach, plum, cherry, apricot nectarine), yew, poison sumac, mountain laurel, or any type of laurel or rhododendron.
How Can You Offer Browse?
Goats usually will eat any browse included in their pastures, so enthusiastically that they kill the plants — they’ll completely defoliate low shrubs, and girdle the bark of trees so they die. That can be useful if you have goats and you want a wooded/brushy area cleared; you can just remove toxic plants, fence the area and turn the goats loose in it. Browse, as well as grass, can be stored for winter.
As you can see, trees and bushes that are woody have deep roots that mean that they still stay green and keep growing even a drought. They are also a good source of fiber for many livestock. Trees and shrubs such as willow and mulberry are good protein for livestock and a Siberian pea shrub is good for coping with droughts.Some plants such as raspberry are goo for animals who are pregnant. If you have these plants available on your homestead you will have a better chance of successfully feeding your livestock even in the middle of a drought.
For more plants and livestock feed that does well in droughts, you can visit:
