We are a highly diversified farm, growing countless types of vegetables, fruits, and flowers and even within a single type of vegetable, often many varieties of each. We don’t just grow food for humans though; we’re also growing food for countless soil microorganisms and macroorganisms, including our sheep!
Our sheep graze on fields of cover crops and vegetable crops (once we’re done harvesting them) but there are times of the year, especially in winter, when this isn’t an option so we feed them hay. For those who, like me, need a reminder, hay is cut green from the entire plant and is used for animal feed. It can be a number of different crops. We’re currently growing alfalfa for hay. Straw is just the dry stalks left behind after a grain crop is harvested and is used for bedding or mulch, not a food source.
The Beet from two weeks ago (which you can read here) had a picture of the alfalfa crop mid harvest. After letting it dry, we got it out of the field with the help of two machines: a hay baler and a bale wagon. Here’s a video of Rye using both pieces of (very vintage and very loud) equipment:
I could watch these machines all day, but just watching the machines in person or in a video fails to capture the art and science of making hay. It also doesn’t share the experience of the hay-maker nor how hay making fits in to the farming lifestyle. For that, here’s an excerpt of a vintage (though less vintage than our machines!) Beet newsletter written by Paul from the first week of July 2010:
“One of the important romances of my farm life (after my sweet wife, my great kids, my wonderful family, my patient partners , the hardworking farm crew, or this small piece of earth itself, or…) was lying under the stars, on a summer night, at 2 or 3 in the morning drifting in and out of sleep on a soft windrow of fragrant alfalfa hay waiting for the dew to settle. I remember being about 16 when I had learned enough to make the judgement about when there was enough moisture in the hay to compress it into a bale and make high quality livestock feed. The window each day was different – sometimes 2 am, sometimes 6 am, depending upon the levels of moisture in the air – usually always gone by 10 am. Hay must be dried completely before it can be baled and stored, but if it is too dry, the leaves shatter to powder. Hence a 16-year old farmer-in-training, reaching over to crunch the mattress of hay each hour to see if the nighttime air had sufficiently hydrated the leaves of dry alfalfa to keep them whole in a bale. What a treat! What a responsibility!
So I convinced my partners this spring (or maybe they once again indulged me) to let me buy a baler to make hay for our sheep and cows. We plant our hay in the fall, and it grows over the wintertime – oats and vetch mainly – to keep our ground covered, and to make dry feed for our animals. We cut those hayfields in the spring, when the oats are heavy, and the crop starts to dry. This hay is fed to our animals when the winter is cold and it is too wet to have them outside. It is then, in the short cold days of November to January when a bale is opened, that all of the warm summertime aromas of good hay are released into a cozy barn. The sheep munch contentedly and thank us for our foresight.
I spent the spring with a task of fitting in haymaking between rainstorms and all of the other ongoing farm work. I rekindled a romance. I crunched and sniffed and recalled a long forgotten seduction of sweet fragrances, open starlit sky, skill and judgement about qualities to be revealed six months from now. Although not as profitable as growing vegetables, baling hay is an activity that needs to be done when the time is right. The responsibility for making good feed is now ours – an act of self sufficiency. We no longer hire away haymaking for someone else to do when they get around to it. The used equipment purchased to make the hay will serve us for many years at a fraction of the cost of new. In a short springtime, this ‘way of life’ has accomplished recycling, remembering, recreating, realizing and renewing romance.”
Elaine Swiedler & Paul Muller
