Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Finishing Hay Before the Rain...

Baling hay has been a challenge this time around!

We would love to have some nice dry, small square bales, but the weather just isn't cooperating.  All during that long stretch of dry weather that we had, second cutting wasn't ready to be mowed yet.  Once it was ready to be mowed, the clouds rolled in and the farmers have been fighting with the weather all week long.  I don't think anyone in the neighborhood got dry squares this time around.

This morning Jim finished up second cutting with twenty three more round bales.  He was baling a mile away at some rental ground, so he rented an Amish neighbor's bale transporter to make the process more efficient.  (Check out the metal wheels on the transporter, and the tracks it left on the driveway.)

My cousin took the bale transporter to the hay field and loaded up five bales at a time, bringing them back to our house.  This was the last load, with only four.  He unloaded them on the driveway...



...and Jim wrapped them and put them in place along with all the other round bales.  This video is a little long.  I've posted him wrapping bales before, but this one shows it from start to finish...picking up the bale, positioning it, wrapping it and dropping it into place.  Part way through he asks me to get some tape for the one bale that had a little tear in it.  They've got to be air tight!



Normally Jim would take the wrapper to the field...pick up two bales at a time...bring them home and wrap them...and repeat the process.  This way he saved a lot of time in transporting the bales, and could just continually wrap until he was finished.

Here's an "oops"...


The net wrap came loose while transporting.  It wrapped "ok", but we'll probably feed this one first, in case it's not air tight.  We don't want moldy hay!

This batch of bales is labelled E2.  E is for Esbenshade's (the farm where it was baled) and 2 for second cutting...


It's super hot and humid today, and thunderstorms are expected to roll through this afternoon and evening.  While we're disappointed to not have dry hay, at least it's finished and there will be about four weeks until third cutting starts.

17 comments:

  1. glad you got it baled, home and wrapped before the next wave of rains! my neighbor is picking up each bale in our field and lining them up in rows to be trailered to his cattle lease place.

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  2. What a lot of work! It's nice to have the shrink wrapping automated.... I cannot imagine doing a chore like that by hand :)
    I'm happy for you to have the hay and have it wrapped. Hope on the next cut, you have drier weather for dry bales .

    Smiles :)
    ~K.

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  3. That's the trouble with rain! It rarely appears (or disappears) on demand. I guess the important thing is you got the hay in eventually. I enjoyed the video.

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  4. Glad you were able to get this work done.

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  5. I love the video and will show it to my husband. His wrapper is slightly different. I like how throughly Jim wraps the bale.

    Have a great week.
    Hugs.
    JB

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  6. Now that's really neat! I've never seen hay wrapped like that. Around here the type of machine is quite different. And I can't believe that you are doing second cut already. Here it'll be the end of summer for that, and virtually no-one gets a third cut!

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    1. We usually get five cuttings, and have on occasion been able to bale a sixth! All depends on the weather, of course.

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  7. This was very interesting. I can't wait for Max to get up an watch. Silly me, I thought it was some kind of bag the bale was placed in.

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  8. Alicia, I showed Max this video when he got up. Neither of us had seen the wrappers in action and found it very interesting. Thanks for posting it.

    I am coming back later to catch up on your blog. Things have been so hectic here that I have fallen way behind in reading and blogging.

    Glad you got your hay up. We hire ours done and are still waiting which makes me crazy!

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  9. What a process!!! Love the videos!!! Makes us all appreciate more the food we eat and the people who allow us to have it! Beautiful country around you!! Thank you for this lovely sharing . I am curious of how the hay, if damp, does not mold inside the wrapper..or does it have to be bone dry first?---Merri

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    1. Merri, The hay is baled at high moisture and wrapped so tightly that no air can get into the bale. It then goes through a fermentation process, and is preserved. I wish I could package the smell of when we first open a bale, and post it here! The cows just love it, and it's a pretty good quality feed, although we'd prefer to have dry hay, both for ease of feeding and for the quality.

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  10. I have never thought about your area being so far ahead of us. Do you get an early spring and warmth from the ocean? Or do you just have a more mild climate?

    My folks got first cutting alfalfa up, they are in south central NE. There has been very little hay cut in our area. I went to North Dakota border town today and saw one field cut. J went to Chamberlain last weekend and saw no hay cut. The moisture keeps coming in regular increments that make it too wet to get in the field. If we don't get moisture tonight J is going to try to summer fallow tomorrow.

    The rain is wonderful, but we are wanting to get some hay put up.

    Thanks for sharing how you wrap to preserve your hay. We twine tie or use net wrap. But, beef cows don't need the same quality of hay that dairy cows do.

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    1. Robyn,
      I'm not exactly sure where our weather pattern comes from, but our last frost date is in mid May. Jim has usually already begun with first cutting by then. The stems are thick and it's really hard to get it dry, so it almost always gets baled wet and wrapped. We usually get five cuttings, and occasionally a sixth, although it's pretty unusual! What is summer fallowing?

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  11. Gosh, you are already on second cutting and here we are on the first. We only get three cutting. It's interesting how different every farm is across our vast land.

    Linda
    http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com

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  12. We finally got all of the first cutting baled this week. My husband tries to time things so we aren't cutting wheat and harvesting alfalfa at the same time, but the weather didn't cooperate this time. The second cutting will have to wait until after we're done with wheat harvest though.

    When Randy was a kid, they put some hay up in square bales, but ours is put up in round bales now. We usually buy a few square bales for "cattle bait" when we're trying to move cattle.

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  13. Well at least you got it done. It's never fun to get the hay rained on. Round here we don't even all have first crop in. Been lots of scattered showers during the day, makin it a chance all the way around to cut it. I guess that is the type of year we're gonna have.

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  14. Well done for getting it all baled and wrapped in between rain. Where there is a will there is a way. And as my husband always says - there's always another cut to do.

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