Haying season is here, we are right smack-dab in the middle of the first cutting and the second cutting.
Hay may seem easy to the untrained eye, basically just mowing your lawn and then baling it into a bale right?
Not even a little bit.
Haying is quite complicated and you need to know a thing or two about what you're doing for it to work out well for you.
This time of year all the farmers around (including ourselves) are knee-deep in hayfields, which not only means making room in the barns but also being sure the hay wagons are emptied of other things that we've been storing on them, and all the equipment is functioning properly.
We also need to stock up on baling twine. This wraps the bails when they are whole to keep it from falling apart. Some farmers use netwrap or plastic, but we use old-fashioned twine because it's biodegradable.
We need to check tire pressures, oil all moving parts, check for damage that happened over Winter and perhaps repair something that we left undone last year.
Haying is hot, grueling and not always rewarding.
The only time I ever get any satisfaction from haying is occasionally in the Winter to see my cows chomping down on some sweet smelling green hay when it's cold, snowy and blowing outside.
The first piece of equipment that goes into haying is the mower. It is, of course, powered by the tractor, so the tractor must be in full working order as well. Before you consider even mowing a field of hay you need to look at the condition of the hay itself, is it close to setting its seed heads? Is it short? Have we had enough rain for it to be thick and lush?
I must also preface this by stating that hay is not just wild grass, it is seeds that we buy and plow the earth to plant. It is a specific mix of types of grasses and Alfalfa's to make a healthy consistent hayfield. A lot of people think it is weed grass, trust me it's not! We pay to put that hay into that field.
When looking ahead and deciding whether to mow a field you must also look at the long-term forecast. You can drop a field of hay, (this is an expression for having it mowed down,) and have a sprinkle of rain that day while it's still green, but rain in the forecast between the time that you mow it and bale it is the worst thing that could happen.
The idea of hay is that you are drying and preserving green grass in order to store it long-term and feed it to animals in the winter months when they probably can't scavenge for it in the three or four feet of snow that we can get.
So, since we are essentially drying and storing food, it should be done properly. If the weather looks good for about 4 or 5 days we go ahead and do as many fields as we think we can manage to bale in that time. It takes a day or two for the hay to dry, and usually midway through this drying we tedd it.
A tedder is something similar to a rake except instead of making it into a pile we flip the hay over to make sure that it dries on multiple sides. If it rains and your hay becomes wet we will often have tedd more than once. The best farmers do everything they can not let it rain on their hay fields.
We are working with Mother Nature and sometimes it happens, so the tedder is a very useful tool. It's loud and grumpy and old, it very often needs to be repaired even though it's mechanical workings aren't terribly complicated it is a frustration for us almost every year.
So let's say you mowed about 20 acres of hay, you had good weather for a few days, it's been tedded and it's ready to go. What do you do now? Now you pull out the rake, and it basically is what it sounds like. This too, like all the other equipment, is run by the tractor.
You run the rake along the hayfield making winrows. A winrow is what you pick up with the baler. This may sound simple but it must be done in a pattern that the tractor and baler can continue to meet. If you make rows too close together or too far apart, the baler will not have an easy time picking them up, or you drive around wasting time and fuel.
You must remember that when you're driving a little Massey with the rake it turns a lot sharper than the big Challenger with the hay baler on it. So you must make wide turns so that the Challenger is capable of following your path.
Baling can be done in 3 or 4 different ways, Styles, and sizes.
On our farm, we have two ways to bale hay, a round baler, and a square baler. A square baler makes small square bales of hay that weigh around 50 pounds. They can be moved by hand, and when you are baling them they must be stacked by a person riding on the hay wagon. Very hot, hard, exhausting work. You are often left sunburned, dusty, and exhausted. In which case at the end of the day, a shower and tall cold drinks are in order.
A Kicker baler throws the bale into a cage wagon, but we don't have one.
So we stack by hand.
The second way we bale hay and definitely our preference is the round baler. It makes very large round bales of hay which must be moved with the tractor. They weigh about 800 pounds and if you're not careful about how you remove them from the hay baler they can roll away and cause damage to fencing, automobiles, and the baler itself. We once had a round bale get away from us, rolled down our entire West hill, and unraveled as it went. It stopped a few feet before the road, there was nothing left to un-roll.
Hay is extremely regional, I have been learning more about ranches out West and their haying is very different from ours, they will often get only one cutting.
Here in New England, we can get three and sometimes four cuttings of hay. A cutting means that you can cut a single field more than once when we market our hay, we classify each cutting as first cutting, second cutting, and 3rd or 4th cutting if there are any. The consistency and nutrition of the hay change slightly and can be better for different types of animals.
First cutting can tend to be coarser, therefore not as desirable for somebody who may have an elderly horse or llamas. Llamas have very soft lips and can only safely eat very fine soft hay. 2nd or 3rd cutting would be best for them.
We try our very best to have healthy hay fields that are as weed-free as possible.
Plowing and replanting hay every 5 years or so is a good step in preventing weeds and other plants that you would not want to have in your bales of hay.
It is grueling hot dusty grunt work that we don't always look forward to in the Summer. It eats up a lot of our weekends and there's a lot of equipment that we are counting on to continue to run.
If your hay rake or baler breaks down when you have three fields down, and there's a thunderstorm predicted for the next day, you've really got to rush around to get things done, and sometimes you just don't make it.
We have lost entire fields of hay before, as much as we plan ahead and do our very best to do it properly, Mother Nature sometimes has her own plans. All we can do is the best we can do, our hope is to feed our animals and our customer's animals throughout the Winter and keep them well and healthy.
There is, of course, the concern of properly storing the hay once it has been baled. The round bales get picked up with a spear point on the front of the tractor and stacked on to wagons, it is then stored under cover whether on the wagon or removed from the wagon and stacked in our pole barn.
Square bales were generally kept in the hayloft of the big cow barn.
We no longer do this because it required hay elevators and a lot of muscle in a very hot, dusty hayloft. We're fairly relieved to no longer store hay this way but there are plenty of farmers who still do that.
You must keep your hay dry, do your best to keep it free of pests.
There's a lot to consider, there's a lot of thought and worry and sweat put into a single bale of hay. Sometimes it feels like it's not appreciated.
One thing's for sure, I think Daisy appreciates our hard work.
So next time you pass by a hay field and see a farmer mowing or baling his hay, please, please do not think it's a larger version of mowing your lawn, because there's a lot more going into it than that.
