Tollerud Farms: Haying and Weather

     Wow the weeks are rolling by in a hurry. It was a race to get the crops in between rains we finally finished planting on June 10th. Then there were cattle to move and Brent started spraying. We started haying on Monday June 17th. This is the latest I ever remember starting because the hay wasn't mature. There was one other year we didn't get started good until the middle of June because we had 10 straight days of rain. However that year the hay was way to old when we got started and we lost a lot of quality. I will dedicate this post to explain how we put up our hay.
    We bale our hay wet and wrap it in plastic to keep the oxygen out. This causes the hay to ferment and it makes excellent feed for the milk cows. We call this balage.  Quality feed is very important for the cows to produce well. If we put up poor feed our milk production could suffer for the entire year. The quality in the alfalfa is in the leaves and during the day the leaves are dry from the heat of the sun even though the stems are still wet. Because of this we try to bale at night or when there is dew in order to keep the leaves attached to the stem. We run a baler with knives in that chops the hay into 4 inch pieces. We switched to this baler last year, it saves a lot on the repair and fuel bill when we mix the balage for the cows.
    After we bale the hay we have around 12 hours to get the hay wrapped. The sooner we get it wrapped the better the quality. Normally we like to haul the bales to the building site and wrap them close to where we are mixing the feed. But there are times when the workload and the weather don't allow for this and we have to wrap the bales on the field and haul them in the winter as we feed. Once the bales are wrapped we can't take them out of the plastic until we are ready to feed them or the bales will spoil. In the winter we can haul bales for 2 weeks to a month at a time. This is similar to sticking your food in the freezer.
     Ideally we like to bale the hay between 40-60% moisture. This usually means baling about one day after cutting. However when making excellent quality balage the wetter stuff get to "hot" and the cows are not able to properly digest it. Everything is a balancing act and tradeoffs in order to get up quality feed to produce quality milk.
    We baled Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I started baling around 9:30 Wednesday night and it started raining about 4am Thursday morning when I had about an hour left to bale. I kept baling until I got done. We got about .75 inch of rain and we went out Thursday afternoon and wrapped these bales on the field. Luckily we did because we had some nasty weather Thursday night. We got about 45% of our hay acres baled June 17th, 18th, and 19th before it rained.
    I'll post again in the next couple of days to explain the weather. It was not good we lost 67% of our beans to hail. It looks like we will get to start planting again, along with haying, spraying, and applying nitrogen fertilizer on the corn.