From the Fields: Hay baled and sold

I’m sure everyone was excited about walking out in the mornings to mid 60s and only heating up to the low 80s. I’m used to begging for rains and cooler temperatures this time of year and we haven’t had to beg or plead for any of that the last couple weeks. The break in temperature has my blood pumping a little harder because I know fall is just around the bend. Crops are sure enjoying a break from the heat and the rain has the soil profile very moist. If we do dry up and get a little warm again, we will have a little cushion. Hopefully, we can catch a few more nice rains and the crops will continue to soak it up.

Thursday, I got the mower conditioner going on the sorghum and millet. It was so thick and had gotten huge with these nice rains we have had. It was about eye level sitting in the tractor cab mowing and so thick you could hardly see anything in front of you. I let it lay most of the day on Friday and used the wheel rake to turn it and stir it up a little and windrowed it for the round baler. Saturday morning, we got started around 11 o’clock with the first couple bales getting the baler dialed in. We started out with a 5x5 bale, which is what we use for our alfalfa when we bale it wet. We quickly found out that those were some stout bales weighing around 2,600 pounds. We had the baler do 35 5x5 bales for us and we hauled them back to the farm and line wrapped them with the rest of our hay. We had a custom bale wrapper come to do the individual bales, which would only handle around 2,000 pounds. We choked the baler down to a 5x4 bale, which still came in around 1,800 pounds a bale, even being on the small end. Wow, that stuff baled up so tight and made so many tons it was unbelievable. We ended up with 150 bales off 20 acres. We worked steadily to keep the wrapper going until around 10:30 that night when the last bale came off. It was a long day, but I had my father-in-law and dad both helping me, so what more could you want? I was thankful that between a Facebook post and word of mouth between neighbors I was able to get all of the bales sold.

We got some pricing on our Merschman beans from our area sales manager earlier in the week. I’m going to try and start working around to our customer base and start testing the waters for the 2021 season. I think it’s going to be critical for guys to take advantage of price opportunities in these early ordering periods to either lock it in on a cash or finance deal to secure the lowest seed cost possible headed into the new season. I always enjoy talking with our customer base catching up on their operations, family and communities. We are trying to grow our seed business now this year with the addition of our E3 beans from Merschman. If your in our area and looking we would love to talk with you and see what options we can bring to your operations.

Hope, Ind.