Haying season came a little bit earlier this year than it did last year. In this region of Idaho, everything is dry land farming (no irrigation), and we have had a pretty wet year so far. This means more grass sooner than normal. Cutting the grass hay also shocks the plant pretty heavily, since a large portion of the plant is cut to make the bales. This causes the grass to turn brown almost immediately after cutting and prevents most hayers in the region from getting more than one cutting per season. While farms in the Treasure Valley are enjoying 3-4 cuttings of hay a year, we only get one on the Palouse!
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| Organic hay at Sosoni Farm, Deary Idaho. Notice the brown grass after cutting. |
Glenn estimated at one point that we hayed about 250 acres or more, and we ended up with a little over 250 round bales. The round bales are supposed to weigh in at about 800 pounds each, so that is a lot of hay! Doing round bales requires that you have some heavy equipment, but it also means you can do everything yourself. Glenn used to do small square bales, but he always had to find local youth to help buck hay and get it stacked in the barn. We have heard numerous stories from local farmers about how hard it is to find kids willing and able to buck hay for pay. It is getting to the point where most kids stay indoors and aren't interested in making money or even spending time outside. How sad! We are trying to break that mold here with the Rappe family. Hopefully Jones, Beaux and Jax will be hard working, eager individuals for years to come!
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| Well formed round bale. Trent on the baler in the background. |
As the farm increases in fertility, the number of bales per acres will increase. Glenn is constantly observing his fields to determine the best candidates for spring grazing. As his ground becomes more productive, he will have more options for rotating his hay ground and allowing his cows to graze the hay ground from the previous year. Glenn's herd is right around 40 head, and he says he would like it to be closer to 75-100 head to be able to make better headway on increasing fertilization on this 1200 acre farm. One thing that would greatly help some of the starved areas would be to do more intensive grazing, and less managed pasture grazing. Keeping the animals in a smaller area for shorter durations helps concentrate manure and also helps the breakdown of the cow pies by ensuring that the cattle will trample the manure, spreading it more evenly.
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| Trent dumping a fresh bale |
As the harvesting season progressed, we fell into a system that seemed to work pretty well. Other than one field at the beginning that Trent helped cut, Glenn did the cutting and then Trent would follow up with the baler. Glenn got a different baling twine than what he had last year, and there would be a huge tangle at the end of every spool that would take 15 minutes to an hour to fix sometimes, depending on how bad the tangle was, and several hundred feet of twine would be unusable at the end! Glenn did a fair bit of baling as well when Trent was busy with other things. Hay season means long hours on the tractor, with a sore back in the evening. Tractors don't have suspension, and the fields are anything but smooth! It reminded us how much we are looking forward to doing haying with horses. Of course haying with horses has its challenges as well! Glenn has two tractors, and we intended cutting hay with the smaller tractor and baling with the larger one, but unfortunately the smaller tractor couldn't handle the PTO load of the swather, and the baling controls were all installed in the large tractor. So the larger tractor ended up being used for everything! So Glenn would usually cut for a few days and then Trent would bale for a couple of days. There was also some unexpected rain during the harvest too, so we tried not to leave too much unbaled hay on the ground at any given time. Once the hay is baled, it can handle precipitation a lot better that when it is laying on the ground waiting to be baled, especially round bales, as they tend to shed water better than square bales.
The kids would have liked to ride with Papa when he was driving the tractor, but there wasn't a good place for them to ride inside where they weren't sitting on some controls, and the fields were extremely bumpy, which would land the kids in his lap! They contented themselves to occasionally heading out to the field on the 4 wheeler and watching the action from the sideline.
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| From left to right, Beaux, Jones and Jax "watching" Papa bale hay from the comfort of their wet flannels and the shade! |
After the hay was cut and baled, it was time to bring it into the barn. The hay trailer could handle 8 bales per trip, so bringing hay back to the barn seemed painfully slow!. Most of the hay fit in the barn, but some had to go on a hillside next to the house. The hay that didn't make it into the barn will be used up before the weather gets too bad and ruins the hay, so all in all not a bad haul! Last year Glenn started feeding the cows hay in the middle of August. It was a drought year, so everyone ran out of hay, driving prices sky high. This year has been much wetter, so we'll see how things go. So far, the prospect of feed the cattle off of our own hay until the cows go back out onto pasture in the spring, seems good!
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| Trent on the baler. |
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| From left to right, Jax, Beaux and Jones behind the swather during a break in the action. (The boys are wearing their Australian hats!) |
