Bales of Hay

We had a reprieve from the daily rainfall, and the hay man called on Tuesday to say he was ready to cut.  Brandon told him to go for it, and by the time we made it home from town, nearly all of our fields were cut.   I sneaked this picture of him as he cut the field in the back corner, near the donkeys.  The hay cutter sticks out to the right of the tractor, and cuts a wide swath.  His tractor is fast, and he cut all our nearly five acres of grass in less than two and half hours.

The hay man was impressed with how thick our hay was, and said that when he was in the thickest part, he thought he might have to go home to fetch his big tractor.  He was using a eighty horse power tractor and a very large cutter.  I took note because we've been having lots of conversations with friends and family about tractors, trying to decide if we should invest it one.  

Unlike when Brandon cuts our grass with the rotary pull behind trail cutter, this cutter slices the hay right at the base, and left the long stalks and leaves intact.  The cut grass stubble that is left behind is short and even, like a perfectly cut lawn.

We enjoyed walking around our fields admiring the long rows of fallen hay.  The hay man said he liked how we keep a mowed path around each of our fields as it made it easy for him to tell where to cut.  

I was out of town for work for a few days, so I didn't get to see how he raked the hay into rows, or see the bailer in action.  He raked the hay during the day on Thursday, and bailed it up on Thursday evening.  Because it's so much faster for him to bail the hay in the big round bales that he can move with a tractor, rather than the small square ones that get loaded by hand, and we wanted to get the hay up before the rain, we agreed to the big bales, and committed to buying the hay man's share at thirty dollars a bale if he would place them in our hay hoop house.   

He made twenty of the five foot bales, plus a little half roll.  He was at our house three times, to cut, rake, and then bale.  I estimate that he spent around ten hours working at our house, and used at least three different tractors.  He had a big tractor for cutting, a little tractor for raking, and big tractor for bailing, and maybe even a forth tractor for moving the bales.  Although the hay was cut a little past it's nutritional prime time, due to weather delays, the hay looks dry and green, smells sweet and fresh, and the animals scarf it up.  

And it all fit inside our new hay hoop house!  Twenty bales should be enough to feed all my animals for around twenty months, so I don't think we will try to harvest any more from our fields this year.  

In the past, when the hay man would stop to offer to cut our fields more efficiently than we could do ourselves, we would try to explain that we weren't interested in stripping every stalk of grass from the fields because we were working to improve our hay plants, not just cut and harvest multiple times a year like he was used to doing.  The hay man is familiar with our fields, because the land used to belong to some of his family and they were always happy to give him the hay in exchange for cutting.  He agrees now that the hay is much improved since we've been limiting the harvest, but still commented to us that the neighbor was just wasting gas by bush-hogging his grass instead of making hay.  

We didn't realize he was going to stack the hay, with three bales on the bottom and two bales on top.  Stacking fit it nicely under the cover, but how am I supposed to scratch hay from those giant bales on the top?  I heard Brandon mention pulling the bales down with the jeep and a strap.  Oh dear.