Hay is Here!
August 2nd, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming
Moving hay bales for winter storage
It’s been a horrible year for hay in our part of the world. With three weeks of steady rain in June, farmers couldn’t get their machinery into the fields to cut grass for hay. Plus, after it’s cut, the grass needs time in the sun to dry before it can be baled. Everyone watched as the fields got taller and taller. Not only did it bring a certain aspect of farming to a standstill, but as the grass gets taller and older, it loses nutritional value. This year’s crop of hay–whenever it did finally get cut–would not be worth as much as in normal times.
The woman who had sold us our sheep–Karen Weinberg of 3-Corner Field Farm–had assured us she had a hay expert who would supply us with enough hay to get our animals through the winter. But with each passing week, as I heard the tales of woe from every corner of the farm community, I got more nervous. Would there, in fact, be hay for us? How would we get our livestock–seven sheep, a cow, and now two goats–through the long, cold winter months without hay? There would be no fresh grass to graze in our pastures.
Then on Monday evening came an e-mail from Karen out of the blue. Her hay supplier had 435 bales ready to move. They were already stacked on wagons waiting to be delivered. I needed to call him, quick.
Except I still didn’t know where I was going to put our hay. We don’t have a barn. My plan was to lay wooden pallets–the kind used to ship commercial goods–on the ground as a base and cover the hay with some sort of tarp. But I still had no idea what the dimensions of this area might be. When I finally got through to the hay merchant on the phone, he started to fill in the blanks. In a great stroke of luck, he also had a special tarp designed to cover a stack of hay that he could sell to me at cost.
First, I had 24 hours to find enough pallets to cover an area 10 feet wide and 36 feet long. No easy task on our hillside property: we don’t have much land that’s level. Those dimensions translate into 27 wooden pallets. The Agway in Salem was able to deliver 15 of them the following day at a cost of $2 a piece. I found the other 12 at the local hardware store where they give them away free.
Not 30 minutes after the pallets were in place, David Weeks, the hay expert, arrived with the first of three big wagon loads of hay bales. In the old days, you’d need some strong hands to move and stack 435 bales of hay. But David has a device that attaches to the front of his John Deere tractor that can latch onto 15 bales at a time and carry them to the designated location.
It took us three hours to stack the hay–me driving David back to his farm four miles away to fetch each wagon load–then another hour to unfold the huge tarp and drape it over the long row of hay.
“Well, there’s you’re new barn,” David said with a laugh.
David Weeks ponders the next move
I can’t imagine what would have happened if we had been forced to move all that hay by hand. David originally had suggested hiring some local kids to do the heavy lifting. But being new to the area, I wouldn’t have known where to begin finding them on such short notice. We were lucky David had the right equipment to do the job by machine–and in record time to boot.
Still, it took me the better part of the following morning to secure the sides of the 36-foot-long tarp to the pallets. I had to make a run to the hardware store for rope. Plus, the ends of the hay stack also needed to be covered with separate tarps. You don’t want to let hay get wet. Once it’s moldy, the animals won’t eat it and there’s no cure for that.
What our new hay “barn” looks like
And wouldn’t you know it. No sooner had I finished covering the ends and lashing down all the tarps than it started raining again. It rained all day. The wind blew, but the tarps held just fine. So far, our hay is dry and we know that when winter comes, our animals will have food enough to last till the grass begins to grow again in spring.
At least, that’s the plan.
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