Bringing in the hay

It's hay time here in North Idaho.

To that end, we've been keeping an eye on the hay market for a good price. We were interested in about five tons to tide us over the winter. We ended up buying hay from the same farmer who sold us our first batch a couple years ago. There was a hitch, however; we would be required to load the bales from the field onto the farmer's truck.

Rather than killing ourselves by loading and stacking 125 80-lb. bales – common sense prevailed and we don't feel equal to the task at our ages – we capitulated and went for larger round bales. Hey, at least round bales can be moved with the tractor.

Last Friday, the farmer (whose name is Byron) brought in a big semi-truck loaded with round bales. He was delivering both to us and to another customer. His truck was far too big to maneuver up our narrow lower driveway to the front of the barn, however, which meant the bales had to be unloaded in our regular driveway in front of the house. We'll move them later at our leisure.

Ironically, Don and Byron talked about the weather shortly before Byron left his place to drive here (he lives about half an hour away). Don expressed concern because rain was expected, and wondered if we should put off delivery for a few days. Byron assured him it wasn't raining at his place, and since he had to make the delivery to his other customer anyway, it would certainly be easier to tackle both deliveries at once. We agreed, and set about moving the cars out of the driveway and making room for a semi-truck and a bunch of 600+ lb bales.

Byron arrived and then, literally – literally – the moment he got his truck backed into our driveway, the heavens opened and it poured.

It started with a good brisk hailstorm...

...then settled into a steady downpour. Byron was incredibly apologetic about the timing (as if he had anything to do with it!).

Don was able to offload the bales using the tractor, though he got soaked in the process.

Meanwhile a thunder cell was approaching, with lightning dancing no more than a half-mile away. We heard some of the LOUDEST thunder I've ever heard as an adult. Seriously, when I was a kid in New York State, we use to get incredible thunderstorms, the kind where children burrow under the covers and the whole house shakes. (True story: Lightning actually hit a neighbor's house one time, blowing a hole in the roof of their garage. That one scared even my dad!)

Yeah, it was that kind of thunderstorm we were experiencing as Don and Byron wrestled with the hay bales and I pulled out the biggest tarp I could find to cover them. At one point, a crack of thunder was so loud I clapped both hands over my ears. Whew!

Byron left, the thunderstorm cell passed by (though the rain continued), and since he was soaked anyway, Don took the time to stack the round bales in an orderly fashion so we could tarp them.

We kept the hay tarped for a couple more days until the threat of rain passed...

...then uncovered it to let it dry in the sun. We're keeping the hay untarped in dry weather to make sure no rot sets in, and periodically re-tarping it when rain threatens.

Bringing in the hay normally isn't this exciting. But, regardless, at least now we have the the livestock feed for the winter.

The green of our valley

Our spring has been very wet, and the little valley we live in is very green.

Interesting, a dominant grass right now is timothy, an excellent livestock feed. And boy howdy, is it full of pollen at the moment!

Here, Mr. Darcy is walking through the grass (the orange blur). Poof! Can you see the cloud of pollen?

Clearly this isn't good for anyone's allergies, but it's great for livestock potential. It's nice to see untended pastures full of decent grasses rather than noxious weeds such as hawk weed or star thistle.

Surprisingly few neighbors around here have livestock. A few horses, a couple of cows, and that's about it.

It's nice to know that when the time come to get our own livestock, they'll have decent forage.

Allergies notwithstanding.

More hay

Because we had such a hot dry summer, we had to start feeding the cattle in August of last year, rather than October as usual. This meant we ran out of hay a lot sooner than we otherwise would have.

We got a few more bales a couple months ago, and it turned out to be lousy stuff -- practically blond in color, and if the cows' reactions were anything to go by, not especially tasty either.

Not wanting to waste it, however, we've been mixing it half-and-half with our remaining good hay, and giving the animals a hay salad. They've accepted this and have been eating everything up, but it's a laborious process to shred and mix the hay twice a day.

But the "good" hay was nearly gone, so this week Don borrowed a trailer from a neighbor and went in search of something better. He came home with two tons of grass hay. (He paid for six and will go back for the other four tons shortly.)

He shoved it into the barn with the tractor.

When we broke open a bale, it turned out to be beautiful stuff. The cattle snorted it up like candy. We're still mixing it with the blond hay so we can use it up, but I told Don I wouldn't mind getting another 30 tons of this grass hay and stuffing the barn full.

The price this farmer was selling it is right, and the quality is good. If he has more available (he said a good amount of what he had left is spoken for), we can fill our barn now, then round it out in the late summer with this year's crop at what will no doubt be a higher price.

Cleaning the barn

We're getting low on hay.

This isn't surprising. Last summer we got a very very bad yield of grass hay from the 25-acre parcel across from us (the absentee owner lets us mow and bale the acreage each year). Yields have been declining for a long time, and last summer hit a new low: only eight tons total, or about 1/3 ton per acre. Good productive fields should yield about two tons per acre.

A fair fraction of those eight tons was pretty lousy stuff, too -- chock full of such inedibles as cheat grass, hawk weed, and St. John's wort (which dries to stick-like brittleness and is like chewing wire for the cattle).

Unsurprisingly we had to supplement by buying some better-quality grass hay to get our animals through the winter. However we didn't get enough, so we just ordered in another ten tons.

To get ready for this incoming shipment, we wanted to clean out not just the barn, but the open area in front of it. You know the saying: nature abhors a vacuum. So do vacant places on a farm.

Don doesn't need much of an excuse to use the tractor. We chained up and moved four tractor tires a neighbor brought for use in the tire garden...

...moved the bucket attachment of our old tractor...

...and moved some old rotting hay bales that had absorbed so much water they must have weighed 100 lbs. each. (We moved them into the pasture to burn later on.)

Then we tackled the inside of the barn.

We had accumulated a surprising amount of hay bale twine. This is highly useful stuff (we've toyed with naming our farm Baling Twine Ranch or something) but it can be overdone. We have thousands of strings of twine and don't need it all. So, in the interest of efficiency, we chucked it into the back of the pickup for a future date with the dump.

It made rather a pretty and colorful tableau once we moved the truck into the sunshine.

In fact, I found it very artistic. Don termed it psychedelic spaghetti.

He used the fork/tine attachment on the bucket of the tractor to scoop up the old hay on the barn floor. Normally the old hay wouldn't be a big issue, but since Shadow and Ninja have been in the barn for a couple of weeks, the floor had a fair bit of manure on it. Can't set hay bales on top of manure.

The tines lifted much of the old stuff in a sort of mat...

...and revealed the gravel flooring of the barn. After a bit of work, most of the barn floor was clean enough...

...and the pile in the field was quite sizable.

Shadow and Ninja watched the progress.

Ninja was fascinated by the tractor, thus proving that a boy's interest in mechanical stuff crosses the species divide.

A few days later, a local farmer brought in the first load.

Beautiful leafy stuff, second-cutting.

Compare it to what we have in the barn at present.

The chickens wasted no time in exploring.

And Shadow wasted no time in munching.

The bales were huge -- on average about 1100 lbs each -- and lay like gigantic play blocks. The nooks and crannies proved irresistible to both chickens...

...and calves alike.

Don tried to load those massive bales into the barn, but they proved too heavy for our tractor. A neighbor (with a beefier tractor) is coming over the weekend to move them for us.

Now we're set for hay until summer!

Hay question

A reader had a question on my post Bringing in the Hay regarding feeding cattle. I started to answer but my reply became so long I decided to make it a separate blog post.

Here is the reader's question:

We are fixing to get cattle for the first time and are debating on how best to feed them. I would like, in an ideal world, to 100% grass feed them, but having only a small pasture (1.5 acres) will make that difficult. Thankfully my parents have a small hay field so we are getting a good deal on hay, but my dad is insistent that we will have to feed grain, too.

How do you feed your cattle, particularly in winter?

My reply:

We feed exclusively 100% grass hay during all times of the year the animals can’t get enough to eat by grazing. Keep in mind if you only have a 1.5 acre pasture (and depending on how many animals you’re getting), it will get eaten down in a fairly short period of time (even during the lushest summer months) and you’ll have to supplement their feed with hay the rest of the year. I sympathize because when we lived in Oregon, our pasture was only about 2.5 acres, so we had to feed almost year-round.

Keep an eye on your pasturage. Some neglectful livestock owners have the extraordinary notion that just because their animals are in a field, they are getting enough to eat. But if the field is eaten down to bare dirt, the animals could be starving. Be vigilant and attentive to the needs of your animals. Besides the cruelty factor, hungry cows won’t give much milk.

For winter feeding (or for feeding when the pasture isn't providing enough food), a rough rule of thumb is about 3% of body weight per day in hay. For a thousand-pound cow, this translates to 30 lbs. of hay per day, usually split between two feedings. Some people free-feed, which is fine; but you’ll go through a lot more hay that way because they tend to lay down on it, and/or defecate/urinate on it.

“Hay” is a generic term referring to dried plant material, either grasses, legumes, or a combination. Depending on your climate, terrain, rainfall, and other factors, you may have to supplement year-round.

Not all hay is created equal. Alfalfa is a high-protein high-quality feed, but it’s also very expensive and a pure alfalfa diet may be too rich. Cheatgrass is a low-quality low-nutritional forage that, at least in our case, our cows loathe. In our area we also get a lot of St. John’s wort and yellow hawkweed, both of which are nasty and non-nutritious for cattle.

I don’t know what kind of grass is in your father’s hayfield, but you’ll need to be vigilant that it’s of decent quality, not garbage.

Grass hay such as a timothy/brome mix, or oat hay, are excellent general choices for livestock. These are usually among the more affordable feeds as well. Because these hays are less rich in protein, a small grain supplement won’t hurt your animals, but it’s not necessary either.

Grain is used to “finish” beef cattle (fatten them up before slaughter). It’s also used to supplement the feed of high-producing dairy cattle whose bodies must go into hyperdrive to supply milk under commercial dairy conditions. But for a small homestead, grain is not necessary except for the occasional “bribe” for training or cooperation (sort of like bribing your toddler with an M&M when they use the potty chair).

Grain is high-protein and cattle love it; but let’s face facts, it’s not what they were bred to eat. Kids love cookies, but they aren’t “bred” to live on cookies to the exclusion of healthier foods. Similarly, cows love grain but were bred to live on grass.

So reserve grain as a treat, a training aid, and perhaps as a nutritional boost for a lactating animal; but don’t get caught up in the notion that livestock MUST have grain. We’ve raised cows for years with nary a grain in sight.

Make sure your grain is INACCESSIBLE to your livestock at all times, except when you're feeding small amounts. We have some friends who tragically lost a beloved dairy animal because she broke into the grain storage and gorged. She had to be put down and it was sad loss to these folks.

Your livestock should also have access to minerals, either with a mineral block or with loose mineral salts.

And needless to say, water! Your animals must always have fresh water available.

Hay day

This time of year can be a bit nail-biting because it's the time of year to get hay in. I say "nail biting" because an ill-timed rainfall can ruin a lot of hay.

Before bringing in hay, however, we needed to prepare the barn. The most obvious problem was all the huge tractor tires that were stacked in front.

We decided to move them to the side and back of the barn. We borrowed a neighbor's tractor for the task. Don managed to snag some of the tires by their rims...

...but for most of them we had to use a chain. At one point a very pregnant Matilda ambled over to see what all the activity was about.

After a couple hours' work, the tires were all stacked behind...

...and to the side of the barn.

We made sure the front of the barn was blocked off by cattle panels (sometimes called hog panels) to keep the critters out of the remaining hay bales.

Now it was time to get hay.

Grass hay is just mown-down field grass, dried and baled. The best fields don't have too much western hawkweed (a nasty invasive species that crowds out grasses) or cheat grass (a nutritionally useless invasive grass that "cheats" by droppings its seeds earlier than other species, thus giving itself a seeding advantage) or St. John's wort (which resembles 12-gauge wire when it's dried).

The absentee owner of the 25-acre field kitty-corner across from our property allows us to mow and bale his pasture. Depending on how much rainfall we get in the spring (this year: not much), we might get anywhere from nine to fifteens tons of grass hay off this property.

This year we'll be over-wintering 18 head of cattle, which means we're going to need about thirty tons of grass hay in the barn. In addition to the grass hay from across the way, we need to find other affordable hay to supplement what we get off this property.

The trouble is, we don't own any of the equipment necessary to bale grass hay. We don't have a tractor, a swather, a rake, or a baler. This means we're at the mercy of whatever farmer we can sweet talk into baling the property for us in a timely fashion. I say "sweet talk" because all farmers are stretched VERY thin this time of year. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done in a very short window of time, and these hardworking people frequently put in 18 hour days getting it done. I say "timely fashion" because if you wait too long to cut grass hay, it turns into grass straw and has very few nutrients.

A local fellow by the name of Alan has mowed the neighbor's pasture for us for the last two years. This year he mowed it on July 17.

A few days later, he mowed another neighbor's land. (No, the cows aren't in with him. There's a fence between them.)

After the hay is mown, it must lie on the ground for a few days to dry. You can't bale fresh green grass or it will rot and mold, and even spontaneously combust a few months later. But when hay is drying on the ground, it's nail-biting. Will it rain?

After the hay dried for a few days, Alan came through with a rake and pulled the rows of hay into windrows. All this means is he blends several shallow thin rows into one larger, wider row. This serves two purposes: it fluffs the hay and lets it dry some more, plus it allows Alan to bale the hay more efficiently.

When Younger Daughter and I returned from our week-long trip to Portland, we saw that Alan had baled the grass hay during our absence.

He also had the first load of bales stacked in the loader to deliver to our place.

Groan. This meant that, no matter how tired Younger Daughter and I were from the trip, the next day was going to be a Hay Day.

Actually, we had no choice. We got home on Monday, and Thursday and Friday promised to be rainy. Rain plus hay equals rot. We can't feed our cows rot over the winter.

We spent some time cleaning up the barn to make room for incoming bales. This meant piling all the haybale twine that gets tossed around all winter long into one spot, as well as pulling aside any other random things on the barn floor (such as a billboard tarp).

In the corner are the bales left over from last year (we had a surplus for once!). We've been feeding these to the bull, since of course he's penned up and can't graze. After some thought, we decided to leave these bales where they are, stack the new hay off to the side of them, and continue using the older bales up first.

We also hired two of Enola Gay's kids, Miss Serenity and Master Hand Grenade (on the right), to help stack bales. These kids are hard workers and strong. (Sorry for the blurry photo.)

Here comes Alan with the first load.

The loader tips upward and tumbles the bales out.

Poor Alan tried to use these built-in feet-pushy-gizmos that were supposed to push the bottom-most bales out, but the durn things got stuck in the "out" position and he spent a frustrating half-hour banging and cursing at the machine until the feet retracted. That's the Big Trouble with farm equipment: it breaks. A lot.

We asked Alan if he wanted to back the loader directly into the barn and stack it that way, but Alan doesn't feel confident about his backing-up skills to avoid hitting the support beams on the barn. Can't blame him, it's a liability issue. So once the bales had tumbled out of the loader, Alan drove off to get another load while Team One stacked about eight or ten bales onto a pallet strapped to the neighbor's tractor and lifted it into the barn.

Then Team Two unloaded and stacked the bales.

We stacked hay for two evenings in a row (Tuesday and Wednesday), and this is what we ended up with: about nine tons. This is about one-third the amount of hay we'll need for the winter.

There was a lot of loose hay that had accumulated in front of the barn. Hey, no sense letting it go to waste! We knew just what to do with it. After blocking off the barn with the cattle panels, we sent out the trumpet call of "Bossy bossy bossy bossy BOSSY!!" over the pasture. Within moments the thundering herd was on their way up.

They dove for the hay and munched away happily.

We got all this done just in time. A few sprinkles fell on Wednesday night, but the heavy rain started on Thursday. It rained and rained and rained, about two inches total (quite a lot for this region at this time of year).

The search is now on for about 18 more tons of hay at a price we can afford, in order to have enough for all our critters over the winter. The rain hit at a particularly vulnerable time for many farmers in the region, and hay prices are likely to be high as a result.

It's a farmer's life.