Well, one of the bummers of not living on the farm (or near the farm for that matter) is that you don’t get in on all of the fun. In this case I missed the cutting of the hay. We have not made any hay yet this year because we haven’t been able to get schedules and equipment to meet up at the same time, but now we are ready to go. This past Thursday and Friday my dad got all of the hay cut (well, all that we will need) and this coming Monday we will rake and bale it. We only have two Dexters right now, but we may end up with as many as 800 or 900 small square bales. I think that should be enough! In fact we probably will be able to get a cutting of alfalfa this year yet because of the warm fall they are predicting and another cutting of grass hay that has recently come out of CRP. We will practically be living in hay!
With the the over-abundance of hay, it is making me wish that we had some more cattle to feed. If only I could find somebody wanting to unload their Dexters. But, we are probably better off with just our two considering we don’t live near them.
I do wish that I was able to be more involved in the day-to-day operations, but I guess all things will come in time. At least I pray that is true. Look for a report Monday night or Tuesday from the baling.
Edit :: Well, there is one sure fire way to predict rain it seems. Cut your hay! There was no rain in the forecast this weekend, but there was some next week so I urged my dad to get the hay cut before the rain … today rain … out of no where … well at least to the weather man it was out of no where! My dad’s Amish neighbor told my dad that it would rain today and of course he didn’t look at a forecast. He just knew it would rain because we had a frost last night. I guess you learn something new all the time. Oh well, we still have some stuff still standing.
It’s sure nice to hear that somebody is up to their ears in hay! Severe shortage around here! But the Lord will see us through one way or another! We were missing the most important mineral this year, H2O! You have a good blog here and I’ll be around often!
Tom
Well, we still will have lots of hay, but it is rained on hay now. Not a huge deal … it wasn’t a lot of rain (I think) and it’s just grass hay. The good news is that we have some still standing along with some alfalfa so hopefully that will work out for us.
A couple of Dexters are avail on the St. Louis craigslist…
John
John – Thanks for the reading. I wasn’t able to find those Dexters on the St. Louis craigslist, do you know what section they were under because I wouldn’t mind checking it out. Thanks again!
http://stlouis.craigslist.org/pet/422229099.html
We haven’t had it quite as bad as northern farmer, but we’re scrounging trying to buy hay for the winter. The hay ground we rent didn’t produce well, and we’ll be losing it next year as the owner is going to plant soybeans to it.
Thanks for posting at my blog – I’m enjoying reading thru your posts!