I Think It's Going to be a Dry Summer - Buying Hay and Loading up the Barn

Hi, I'm Pete and welcome to Just a Few Acres Farm, here's the deal, it's hot, it's dry and crunchy, everything is crunchy, it probably hasn't rained in two weeks, everyone is full of general unhappiness, okay, belly, Acres, I'm

going

to take care of you, you know what I always do, be careful, wrap chives, yeah, we're

going

down there you know where we're going, we're going to be weird, okay, you can go, hello, little one, 2304, they are having a Chomp Fest. Here, well you have some big bites, the grass growth is weakening, it's just not what it should normally be this time of year, early June, it would still be pretty wet with regular rain and it's just not happening and there .

There's not much of anything within the possibility of thunderstorms, you know how that goes this day or what happens when there's a dry spell like this, the grass will quickly go to seed and the tips will start to burn and everything. it stops even the clover is starting to turn yellow this is the red clover the alfalfa is still growing well but it has deep roots now here's the thing this is the field they just came out of and there is still a decent amount of forage here in the which I could have left them for a couple more days, this is a field they came out of about a week ago and you'll see what happens, they've done a good job cutting the things they were going to plant, but there's not a lot of volume here, this field Just put it five acres and you have a decent amount, but it's nothing compared to what it should be this time of year.

Two things number one, remember that grasses video I did about a month ago, delicious grasses. I said it's time to improvise after you it's like a football game where you plan your first few plays and then make the decision based on what's happening we're going to have to improvise herding whereas I would normally slow them down because the grass is growing. faster they can eat it now I'm going to speed them up because I don't want the grass to get so damaged that it's already stressed from the dry weather so I'm going to move them in these fields to probably three or four days on this at most and then down for a couple of days for a couple of days and back and forth so they don't take too much.

The other thing is you can ask, well you just cut 11 acres of Hay, why did you do that? You could have saved it for pasture and the reason is because in those fields where you have overly mature grass it is better to hang them and remove all that material because the cattle will be very selective. how they graze it and much of it will go to waste differently than when that material is all tied together in a bale of hay, they will cut it more indiscriminately you guys scroll down there's a lot of good stuff to find in this.

In the countryside it's still early

summer

, so it's hard to know if this is a trend. I don't really feel like there's a trend for

summer

until you get to the end of June, but I'm nervous enough to hedge my bets, especially considering there may not have been a second cut within the past week. I put a total of 93 bales in the

barn

, 25 of our own five-by-fives, the big monsters, and then 68 of my neighbors' four-by-fours, which volume-wise, are about half the volume of a five-by-five. five and in total that's 118 days of feed for the cattle, plus I have about 30 bales from last year and the year before stacked along this wall if this spring Behaving normally, I would say that I am in good shape because there is a second and maybe a third cut most years.

I do not take risks. I do not take risks. I may be feeding hay in a couple of weeks if it doesn't rain. This brings up the term carrying capacity. What is the carrying capacity of your earth? How many cattle can graze and make hay on your land in a typical year? You don't design or build your farm for extreme years, you build it for a normal year and then you make contingencies for when you have extreme wind, so in a normal year we are grazing cattle all summer and we are going to feed hay in November or December if I planned for an extreme year like this instead of 30 or 35 heads.

It would probably take 10 heads. That's not realistic. You have to design according to averages and not worst-case scenarios. It's like irrigation. We don't have irrigation around here. It is quite uncommon in this part of the country. Say there's something in the west because it would never pay for itself. You need it so little that it just doesn't make sense. Our rains are frequent enough in the summer to keep things growing most years. You have to look at Payback plus. putting an inch of water on an acre what is 10,000 gallons of water? It's not practical without a lot of infrastructure costs, but I have another option.

I bought all the first cut hay a neighbor had, but I have more than one neighbor. Dale, I'm connecting the car, come, it's a good time for you, we're all connected and ready to go, we're going down a road right here, here's some of that still in the field, remember to go up a road and then finish. a road is about two miles from my house to this place here we are this used to be a dairy farm my neighbor Dale Rankin I would like to introduce you and Dale, you have something to say, he is a man of few words but he has a lot of hay , we are going to go down here to this field, we are going to collect the amount of hay from the field, it is easier than moving it twice for him and I don't mind entering the field with the truck, that sure is nice. round bales and a clean field, forest and sky, a moving grip, these bales are four feet that way and about four and a half feet this way, which is about a day and a half of food for our herd.

Nice, just rescued a few days ago, that's a load. 11 bales out, Dale is going to pick up the bales in this field so they'll be quicker to load while I unload this load and load and load that load and load I bought bales from Dale last year towards the end of the season and we were talking here after it loaded and the density of the bales is different because, like me with the hay you saw, the material dried so quickly when we were doctors, I mean dollars for the other people I buy hay from, They were bailing it out very dry. you can't get the bullets, it's not that easy to get the bullets that dense and you get a lot of chaff out of the chamber when you wrap the bullet and that's why the bullets are probably lighter but they have the same amount of material because the content humidity is less, a lot of dust, strange, it's ready for me this time, I feel like I'm about to land for most of my life, we've dealt with little square bales, I always grew up as a kid on the farm.

Small Square Bales Rescued Hillary and I started packing small square bales, getting up to 3500 bales in the last year we did it, it was a lot of work so here are some calculations for you. Dale says each of these bales probably weighs about 600 pounds. He didn't weigh any of these and they are a little lighter than what he usually makes. He said he normally makes 650 to 700 pound bales. These are very dry, so let's say 644 bales is what I'll receive today and that's 26,400 pounds. of hay, we're about 13 tons short of getting load number three now, if we put it in terms of square bales, let's say the average square bale weighs about 40 pounds, that's the equivalent of 660 square bales, so if I go back to my childhood and

think

about or even when Hillary and I started growing 660 square bales, it was about six wagon loads, if they were dropped from a kicker on the wagon, they could be stacked tighter if you lifted them off the ground and stacked them. by hand, but, of course, that's a lot.

More work than just getting them off Bale's kicker or Bale's thrower anyway, six loads of hay would make Hillary and I sweat, we'd be at it, yes, in the afternoon, but hey, we'd be exhausted, now look how he does it we make. two guys two tractors no sweat, it's about 90 degrees today do it in three hours incredible incredible how much work we can save these days last load Dusty last failure that's a lot of hay just to give you an idea because I know it's hard to see through the camera, this wall is 40 feet long and this width is 50 feet, so I almost filled that entire area except this little corner because I have this junk here that I need to move, there just wasn't time.

To do so, I have never had so much hay in the

barn

in early June, not even close, by my count. I have 30 from last year, 25 of my own recently rescued, 68 bought from a neighbor and 44 from another neighbor. Which ends up being: I don't know, you can do the math. I made the number of days of feeding, although I based it on the size of the Bale and what I know is that the herds eat and I have 244 days of food here, on the day of take-off. or a couple of hours, that's what I guess, anyway, I'm three quarters of a year gone and I have bad memories of it and I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be a dry summer and it'll be time to buy hay when you know or you do it.

I

think

there's a dry spell coming up, is it the beginning, not during it?, because the price of hay is going through the roof, so I'm glad I got what I need. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be wrong and I'll still follow you. I know you can never have too much hay in the barn. We will feed it. We will have to buy less next year. If that's the case, we're prepared and it's a good feeling to go to bed at night. I hope you enjoyed this. video and see you next time