Rural Issues: Making hay while the sun shines

I have a love/hate relationship with hay season on our farm. The goal of course is to harvest at a time when the grasses and/or legumes are at just the right stage of maturity.

As the plants advance from the vegetative state to the seed stage, they become higher in fiber and lower in protein, digestibility and palatability. We try to cut at a time of optimum nutrition, but even more importantly in a three-day window with no rain and good curing conditions.

Rain can cause leaf loss and leaching of nutrients from the hay. You do not want to leave it too many days in the hot sun as the hay could bleach and become overly dry and brittle.

Finding that three-day window when the hay was at optimum stage for cutting was a challenge this year. Here in mid-Missouri we were getting just enough rain every couple of days to keep us out of the hay field.

We never want to “turn off the tap” because once those rains stop moving through, we fear they will not come back. We got lucky, though, and when it was dry enough to mow, there were a couple of days when the blue skies were dotted with cumulus clouds and there was just enough of a breeze to cure the hay nicely.

Tedding, raking and baling went well, other than a breakdown on the big round baler that took most of an afternoon to repair. We are satisfied the big round bales will provide the nutrients needed for our cow herd during the winter months.

We also put up a few hundred small square bales each year. Looking back over the past two decades, we typically haul that hay in on the first hottest day of the summer.

I am certainly not as much help bucking those bales or stacking them on the wagon as I used to be, but we are fortunate to have a young brother-sister crew not only willing to help us out, but who enjoy the experience. There are few things that smell better than a barn filled with this season’s hay crop.

With summer’s hot breath on my neck and sweat trickling down my nose and fogging my glasses, I look to the heavens and offer a quick prayer of gratitude for the good help, the good hay and the good conditions.

Losing part of a hay crop to a pop-up rainstorm is deflating and can be costly. I know. It has happened to us before.

Many farmers today are armed with a toolbox full of new hybrids, pesticides, herbicides, tillage equipment, the best fly control and nutritional plans for your livestock, computer programs designed for precision application of herbicides, fertilizer and pesticides. GPS can be used for field mapping, soil sampling, farm planning, tractor guidance, crop scouting, variable rate applications and yield mapping.

Yet still we are unable to control the one factor that has the most impact on our livelihood: Weather.