Harvest Time

The corn and beans are still green in the fields, I'm knee deep in tomatoes but my thoughts have turned to gathering in hay for the cattle's winter feed. I don't have the time, equipment or land to make my own hay so I purchase it from others. Economically speaking, it would never pay me to buy the equipment I
would need to make my own hay, but I always cringe at what it costs to buy hay especially around here. This is horse country and the horse people are way too picky about their hay. That means we few cattle folks end up paying a premium for hay. Fortunately, this year, the first cutting hay wasn't that good and a lot of hay farmers baled it into 500 plus pound round bales. These bales are perfect for feeding cattle.

I spend a lot of time trying to judge how many cows I can feed with a single round bale. The bales weigh between four hundred and five hundred pounds. They will sit outside in the weather where their round shape you help them shed water, but not snow. Wet seeps into them from the ground, critter sleep on them and in them and by the middle of the winter they are looking pretty sorry. Technically a 500 pound round bale should feed 20 cows for one day. The problem is keeping all 500 pounds of hay in good, eating condition.

This year I've been collecting wooden pallets with the idea of placing the bales on the pallets to keep them off the wet ground. I have plenty of barn space for square bales, but square bales are usually horse hay and horse hay is ridiculously expensive, plus its labor intensive for me. I like feeding square bales because I can be very precise about how much  hay I feed. I can feed in hay racks and the waste is minimal. But square bales require a lot of handling. I'll be feeding 25 head this winter and that would mean putting out a minimum of 12 square bales a day at 50 pounds each. That's a lot of lifting and hauling in cold weather. With the round bales I should be able to set out a couple a week using the tractor with its bale spear and save myself a lot of time and muscle. But round bales have a lot of waste. If they sit out on the ground in the weather they loose anywhere from 20% to 30% of their value. I don't have a barn big enough to easily store big 500 pound round bales so that's why I decided this year I'd collect discarded wooden pallets and store the bales on those.

Sunday my neighbor, whose cattle I board in exchange for help around the place, hauled 11 big round bales in for me. Tuesday he brought over another 31.  I laid pallets out where I thought I would like to store the hay and started placing bales.  The bales were way bigger than the pallets and I quickly ran out of pallet space so most of the 31 bales are stacked on the ground. It was a good idea for the first ten bales or so, but 40 bales on pallets would have been a lot of pallets!  Now my challenge is to get tarps over the bales and secured so the wind and rain and snow of winter stays off the bales.

About now I'm thinking ahead and realizing my stash of round bales, which is taking over the ground around the barn and down the drive, will only last through December!  Did I mention I also have cows for sale?