Rye Grass 2017...

Well the spring/ summer work has officially begun...

Jim had the rye grass mowed on Thursday,  tedded it and raked it up on Friday, with plans  to bale and wrap on Saturday morning. Then...a surprise thunderstorm rolled through early Saturday morning.  Change of plans.

Saturday ended up being a good drying day, so he tedded it again so it could dry out, raked it back up, and baled over evening milking time...

Yesterday morning he used the bale hugger to stack the bales...

We have twenty eight bales of rye grass stacked up, fermenting and hopefully turning into good feed for the cows!

Crows, Crows, Go Away...

Crows.

I've written about them before...how they are such a nuisance to farmers. They scavenge just about anything, sometimes harmlessly, but sometimes they cause damage to growing crops or in this case to already preserved feed.  Here's a post written almost exactly two years ago about how they can damage a silage ag bag.

We don't put out silage ag bags any more, but we regularly have round bales of hay wrapped in plastic which are stored along the edge of the fields.  Jim then brings them into the barn as we need them.

Over the past couple of years, we've had problems with numerous animals damaging the bags.  We've had cats using them as scratching posts, and this year the damage has been from crows!

We've seen large flocks of them in the fields around us over the past few weeks, and last week we discovered that they'd been having a feast on some bales that we had stored along the edge of a field on some rental property.

This bale is laying on it's side now, but you can see all the tape that is covering up crow damage.  If you can imagine the bale rotated 90% counter clockwise, this would have been the top of the bale.  The birds sat on top and pecked away through the plastic until they reached the hay underneath. Once air gets inside the bag, spoiling begins quickly.  You can see near the middle of the picture, a hole that was either made after I initially taped the bale up, or one that I missed.  I think probably the birds came back because there was another hole pecked right through a piece of tape. Grrr...

They also sat on the ground around the bags and pecked away at "crow level"...anywhere from 8" - 12" from the ground.

This is one of the bales right after Jim opened it up...

You can see a bit of mold in the center right side of the picture.  Thankfully, Jim caught the damage pretty early, and the mold seems to be only on the first few outside layers.  A few days later and the bale could have been pretty seriously damaged, and into the gutters it would go, wasted.

I'm thinking back a few years to when flocks of crows were hanging around the local shopping mall, creating dirty messes on shoppers' cars and on the roof of the building.  In a letter to the editor in the newspaper, someone suggested that "the crows be sent out into the country into the farm fields where they could live in peace".

Hmmmmm....I'm glad that wasn't even a realistic option!

Rye Grass 2016...

Oh my...the weather this spring has been a challenge!

We had a dry April...and now a wet and cool May.  It's time to be thinking seriously about planting corn, and soon after, soybeans.

The fields have been sprayed, and the weeds are dying.  That's a good thing.

The weather has been cool and rainy.  That's not such a good thing.  Not when it doesn't stop.

But first things first...

The rye grass was just beginning to mature, and to get the best nutritional value for the cows, it should be harvested before the heads form.  The weather wasn't looking too promising, but Jim thought he might get a window of sunshine, so he mowed on Thursday.  The rye grass was thick and beautiful...

On Friday it rained all day, but because the grass hadn't dried yet, it didn't do too much damage.

On Saturday the sun came out, and Jim used a tedder to spin the cut rye grass out and flip it over so it could dry more thoroughly.

Sunday was sunny and breezy.  Good news!

Yesterday was cloudy, and we hoped the rain would hold off, which it did. Jim raked the grass into windrows...

Last night over milking time, the round baler came and baled.  We got 43 round bales off of seven acres.  That's a good harvest!  No pictures of that, because I was milking and Jim was busy wrapping bales.  He finished around 1:00 am.

This morning when we got up, it was starting to rain.

Here's the line up of bales along the water way here at home.  (That's a roll of ag bag tape you're looking through)...

A couple of the bales had some damage, so my job was to find the holes and tape them up thoroughly.  The bags must be airtight, or the feed will mold and spoil...

The bags were wet, so I took a wad of paper towels along with the ag bag tape and taped them up...

Here's the empty field.  I'll have to ask Jim what will be planted here next...corn or beans?

My helpers eagerly ran along side of me on our way back to the barn.  Sorry girls...it's too wet for you to ride in the truck, and besides...it's good exercise!

Now we wait for a week or so before we start feeding the rye grass.

The cows should be happy!