Our Farm Practices
Our cattle are on grassy pastures for about one year then they receive a nutritious farm produced, balanced diet. The ration includes corn earlage, minerals, and distillers grains.
We sell our beef steers locally and to national packers who distribute our beef across the nation and globe!
Looking for locally produced quality beef? You're in the right place. We sell beef by the package and in bulk. Just email blightfarms@yahoo.com with your order.
We raise quality pork that gets to your grill and kitchen table through local and national meat processing facilities.
Individual pig health and care if very important to us. In 2021 we started raising Berkshire pigs without using antibiotics, ever!
In order to maintain healthy pigs we are striving to keep their digestive systems healthy by feeding them barley, oats, yeast, and of course a balanced multi-vitamin mixture.
We sell our pork locally! Email blightfarms@yahoo.com if you would like a whole hog delivered to our local butcher for your freezer. Individual cuts of pork may also be purchased.
Our soils are generally light and stoney so in order to control runoff and erosion problems we have become a no-till farm. No-till means we avoid tilling fields in between crop rotations.
The picture below illustrates the no-till concept. Corn stalks from last fall are still visible on the ground along with the leaves from this years soybean crop.
The plant debris left in the field from the previous crop adds organic material to the soil which helps maintain good soil structure, aeration, and water penetration. It also provides food for micro-organisms.
As you can see in this picture, we plant a new crop right into the field without tilling or plowing it first.
We use GPS and field mapping in our tractors as a tool to improve our planting and harvesting efficiency.
Using GPS in combination with our farm equipment gives us the capability to draw a map of our fields and maintain better records regarding productivity and ground nutrient requirements.
Nitrogen is a limiting factor in crop production and farmers seek ways to hold it in the soil, especially over winter. That's where cover crops come in.
Pictured here is a combination of oats and radishes growing.
Along with holding nitrogen in the soil longer, cover crops have allowed us to build the organic matter in the soil and help control weeds from the time we harvest in the summer and fall until the following spring.
We plant cover crops to our harvested wheat fields in July along with applying hog and cattle manure.
We favor cover crops that naturally die over winter. In this picture you can see the radishes and oats did not survive the cold winter.
Blight Farms received its first MAEAP verification in 2006! Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program or MAEAP is sponsored by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and confirms the implementation of agricultural pollution prevention practices on a farm. MAEAP is a voluntary program that encourages land stewardship and seeks to identify and decrease environmental risks by the ag industry. In order to maintain verified status, farms must continue following MAEAP guidelines even after the initial verifications has been reached. For more details regarding MAEAP please visit the MDARD website.