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QUESTION:Why grow hay? I can pick up all I need at $2/bale in the field.
There are at least three good reasons to grow hay:
- as a business;
- because you don't want your meadows and fields to revert to
woods, jungle, or desert;
- because you want some control over the quality of the feed
you give your livestock, and are willing to trade your labor
for a savings in cost.
How do I gather the hay? Is there an alternative to baling?
What does it take to convert my overgrown lot to a hayfield?
ANSWER: Round bales are a one-person operation. Years ago there were
round balers that produced bales of 60-100 pounds. Today, most
round balers produce bales of 750-2000 pounds. The bales are
either left in the field until they are used, sometimes covered
with a machine-applied plastic sleeve and lifted off the ground on
old pallets or tires, or they can be moved to a covered storage
area with a bale spike on the bucket-loader or three-point hitch
of a tractor. Round bales are labor-saving, both in baling and
feeding, but even when the bales are stored under cover it is hard
to get the same quality hay as small square bales. Recent
experiments suggest that the cost of constructing inside storage
for round bales can be amortized quickly with the reduction in
waste; an alternative, for beef cattle, is to spray the bales with
beef tallow. For animals that trample their hay, like sheep, round
bales require some thought in designing feeders.
Hard work and patience. Once the field is clear of stones and
stumps -- which may require a bulldozer or backhoe and hours of
stone-picking -- do a soil test and add lime as needed to bring
the pH up to whatever your planned hay crop requires. Lime
migrates slowly in soil, so adding more than two tons/acre may
require a year or so of alternate crops before the pH is at the
required level. Once the pH is where you want it, you can either
disc the field or kill the existing vegetation with Round-Up and
plant no-till.
A heavy drag behind the disc will help level the field. To
control weeds, it sometimes works well to disc and plant an annual
crop, like buckwheat, oats, rye, or dwarf rape that you can later
disc in, perhaps with a heavy application of manure, before you
seed the hay. A dense stand of buckwheat will choke out weeds
that would overwhelm your new hay seeding and add to the tilth of
your soil when you disc it in; temporary crops like rape, turnips,
rye, or oats can provide pasture for animals or a quick cutting of
hay while they're helping get the field ready for seeding hay.
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