Have you ever wondered how the hay bales are made? And why they are?
Hay season has arrived in full force on our farm. I always feel like squirrels this time of year. We’re stockpiling feed for winter when there won’t be any for the cows.
Jackson County, Kansas, is the brome seed capitol of the world! Our claim to fame. We have a lot of brome grass on our farm. The seed is grown on the top part of the grass. If harvesting the seed, it has to be cut before we can put it up for hay. Brome seed isn’t normally ready until shortly after the first part of July. There’s a huge trade off between getting the money for the seed and having to wait until then to harvest the hay.
The grass, just like in your yard, dries out the later we get in to summer. We don’t have any irrigation on our farm, so it gets watered when it rains. The hay is what we feed to the cows in the dead of winter so we want the nutrition to be super high and good quality so the girls can stay in good shape. Waiting on the seed to be cut decreases the quality of the hay.
Haying, just like everything on the farm, requires careful care and precision.
- MOWING-First, we mow the hay down. We do this with a swather. There are a bunch of different swather types and brands on the market. But think of this like you mowing your yard. The swather puts the hay in to windrows.
- RAKING-Then the hay lays for 1-2 days usually, drying. The hay needs to be dry to put in the bales so it doesn’t mold and rot. After it has dried on the top, we use a rake to flip it to the other side so all the grass is dry. Normally, we combine two of the swathers windrows for the baler.
- BALING-Then, we bale it. Our baler has a moisture monitor on it so we can know how wet the hay is and whether it’s ready or not. Again, it’s vital that wet hay doesn’t go in a bale because it will rot.
- HAULING & STACKING-After the hay is baled, it gets hauled and stacked. This is for ease of access in the winter, but we also want the grass to grow back and when a bale is sitting on the ground, the grass underneath is going to die.
Just for reference, a cow eats approximately 20-25 pounds of hay per day in the winter. Our round bales weigh about 1300 pounds. That means one bale of hay will feed a cow for about 52 days. Our feeding season, depending on weather and how much stockpiled grass we have, is closer to 120-150 days. It takes a lot of bales to get our herd through the winter.
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~Matt & Kelsey