Haying 101

Perhaps I should back up a step and make sure things are perfectly clear for everyone. Here are some facts:

1. Cows eat grass. Not always, but while we own them, that is the vast majority of their food. In the winter, we sometimes feed a grass-corn mix that has a higher conversion rate of feed to meat. Also, they burn more calories staying warm in the winter, so they do better with the mix.

2. Grass comes from fields. Occasionally, we plant grasses, usually alfalfa, to provide them with higher-protein food. Alfalfa can be too rich, though (horses especially are susceptible to "foundering" on too much green grass), so we prefer to feed an alfalfa-grass mix. By grass, I mean whatever grows: hardy, native grasses.

3. Grass doesn't grow during the winter. As you may know, it gets pretty cold up here, and things can get tough in January and February. If you put cows in an ungrazed pasture with less than, say, 4 inches of snow cover, cows will forage under the snow for the leaves buried beneath. They can actually do quite well on this. When the snow gets deeper or when the field was grazed in the fall, they can't do this.

4. There is more grass in the summer than the cows can eat in that time. Ranchers (sensible, "sustainable" ones) only raise as many cattle as they can support year round. If you graze all your pastures during the summer, you have to buy hay all winter. That gets expensive, at least some years.

Haying is what results from these facts: ranchers become farmers, storing up hay for the winter months. We put up a lot of hay, quite literally. Our hay yard, in the fall, will have several hundred tons of hay that are fed out two or three bales at a time, every other day or so, over the course of the winter. A bale of hay, for our purposes, is the big round kind, not the big or small rectangular bales. My father still complains about the days he put up square bales all summer. We still make a few small alfalfa bales (weighing around 50 to 70 pounds each) occasionally for cows who have just calved in the barn; they need the protein of good alfalfa hay.

These days, we make round bales that weigh between 1,200 to 1,500 pounds each, stacked into 28- or 32-bale stacks (18 first row (3 by 6), 10 second row (2 by 5) and, possibly, 4 third row (1 by 4). The number depends upon how much they weigh; if we intend to move them on the roads, stack-movers won't do it if they're over the axle weight limits. Somebody who moves hay for us once got fined $13,000 for being over the axle limit with a load of our hay. So now we only make our stacks with 28 bales.

The actual process of haying is, for us, four steps: cutting, raking, baling, and stacking. A swather cuts hay; ours is a 4895 John Deere with a 16' header (where the hay goes in) and a reel and auger cutting system (as opposed to a rotary system). It deposits the hay into a 3 foot wide row called a 'swath.' Once the hay is on the ground, we leave it to dry a couple days, until its moisture content gets down below certain values. If you don't wait, the hay will heat up as bacteria digest it, and it can spontaneously combust. If it doesn't burn, it will certainly mold; that also ruins hay.

Rakes are large spinning reels that collect two of the swaths together into one. The rakes are run at the same time as the baler to speed up baling and reduce wear and tear on the baler. Our rakes are Vermeer. The baler, run simultaneously by another operator (in most operations, but not all), is the thing that actually collects and contains the hay by wrapping it in either twine or net-wrap. We switched to net wrap a couple years ago because it cuts baling time by almost a 1/3. I won't go into details now. Our baler is a John Deere 566 (unfortunately, no Mega-Wide pick-up for us).

Stacking is my least favorite part, because it requires one's full attention and I'm not very good at it. We just got a self-leveling John Deere grapple fork on our new tractor, but I can't remember the model number for it or the one on the old tractor that isn't self-leveling.

These are some of the basics of haying. I was out cutting again today, and I have some ... I'll just say it, adorable pictures of a faun I managed to save today. It was the youngest faun I think I've ever seen; I was actually able to catch it because the alfalfa was taller than it was. I guess I'm glad it's not dead. It was just so darn cute. I might post pictures of it tomorrow.