In this project, we finished Texas longhorn beef cattle on the Sunshine Farm by using polywire (temporary electric fence) to break-feed crop residues and forages in a narrow strip cropping system without supplemental feed. To close the nutrient cycle between cattle and crops, the project was recommended February 1995 by the seven-member Farmer Advisory Committee for the Sunshine Farm. The committee is part of the Heartland Sustainable Agriculture Network, administered by the Kansas Rural Center as a state-wide consortium of local groups of farmers for the purpose of sharing experience and information in sustainable agriculture. This project was part of The Land Institute's Sunshine Farm, an energy-integrated organic farm initiated in 1993 with research projects to determine if a farm can provide its own fuel and fertility (Bender 1995).
