The crop we used was called Kafir Corn---it was a cane sorghum crop that some farmers chopped up and stored in silos. They ran it through a chopper and blew it up to the top of the silo where some unfortunate worker tromped around to pack it down. We harvested it in the field with a binder which tied it up in bundles with twine and left them on the ground for us to come along and arrange them in teepee-shaped piles called shocks. They remained there until we had time to gather them and haul them to a stack near the feeding corral.
Each morning when we did chores, we had to pitch these bundles off the stack and into the feeding troughs. We also used alfalfa hay, but we did not grow it because our upland soil didn't suit it. We purchased it from neighbors who had bottom farmland, and pitched it into our hay mow. It was from there that we fed the barn animals: calves, the milk cows, and the horses. The real modern ones baled their alfalfa and used machinery to do most of the work. I sometimes hired out to work with harvesting alfalfa. Someone else always did the baling and I worked with someone else to pick up the bales, toss them onto a hay rack, and lift them into the hay mow. Pitching hay or lifting bales was very hard work.
In the Fall when all the shocks had been collected from the field, we stretched an electric fence around it and turned the cows into it to graze on the stubble. The cane stalks were full of juice and made excellent fodder. In the Spring, we tilled the fields, cleaned out the corrals. Feeding all that livestock over the winter produced a prodigious amount of manure, so each Spring we had to shovel out the stables and corrals and spread the manure on places that needed fertilizer, and the process started all over again.
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