Lost Hay

Yesterday we spent some time wiring my brother's tractor to run my round baler. We ran the power to the wrong side of the tractor and found that we weren't getting enough voltage, so we re-ran the wires and finally got enough power to run the computer monitor for the baler. Then we got out to his "hay". He has about 11 acres of alfalfa and he had cut his hay just before the rain started which was about 2 weeks before I cut over on my place. It rained so much that his hay eventually was no good to even bale. It wouldn't dry down and it eventually molded. He also had an enormous amount of corn stover. So we baled the "hay" to get it off of the field and let the alfalfa grow again. We spent some time testing the baler's functions at the same time since the bales were not going for sale or feed. Now Tim and my son George are experts on running the baler. I also know what I need to talk to the John Deere dealer about in regard to my baler.

Whew! First Cutting Alfalfa In The Books

As you can see from the posts, the alfalfa has been cut for what seemed like an eternity. It rained off and on and kept me going to the field thinking today is the day that I'll finally be able to get the hay up, only to have it rain or get too humid to dry it down enough to bale. I talked to a neighbor yesterday. He and his father came buy to talk about our oat hay. Anyway we both thought that we were going to bale on Tuesday at about 2PM. But at 12 noon it rained. Guess everyone in our area had the same problems. It feels good to have it finally up and out of the way. I think we got about 32 tons off of the field. Since this hay was rained on I'll use this hay to feed to my cows over the winter. It's not that I couldn't sell it, it came off the field nice and dry and the leaves stayed on it really well, but I'd rather use the hay for myself and only sell the best hay. We did figure out that you can only put 11 round bales on my trailer without straps. I rounded the corner of the field onto the gravel road and half of the trailer load went into the ditch. We only have to pull round bales out of the ditch once to know that I don't want to have to do that again.

Still Trying To Do Hay

We were able to get some grass hay up this weekend. We had cousins visiting - one from Maryland and one from Colorado. They arrived on Saturday afternoon and once they had unloaded their luggage at my brothers they came down to the hayfield we were working. They missed doing square bales, but I did get them in the tractor to try rolling a round bale. It is a lot of fun to get someone behind the wheel of a tractor for the first time and to run a round baler down the field. We windrow our hay narrow enough that we have to switch back and forth across the windrow to make an even bale. If you have never run a tractor, or you haven't run one in years, it can be a challenge to coordinate all of the activities required to make a nice bale. They made some very nice bales and we didn't run anything over we didn't want to, so it was a success.
My son Tom who is 10 and I raked alfalfa hay this morning. This morning was one of those mornings that had heavy dew on the ground, blue sky above and made the hay smell so sweet. It was a joy to share that opportunity with my son. He did a great job too. Now if it will only dry I can get it off the field and can get on to other jobs like cutting the oats and working on the well.

Back in Business

After breaking the front end of the tractor, what should have been a simple fix turned into a multi-day extended repair. The part that broke - a tie rod - comes in 3 parts. There is an inner ball joint, an outer ball joint and the rod that "ties" it all together. Since I only popped the outer ball joint I ordered an outer and it arrived the next day. When I went to get the old outer out, it wouldn't budge. Even after heating and using the biggest wrenches I have available. So I ordered the inner. Unfortunately I assumed that the inner would also come with the rod. My mistake. When the inner came the next day with only the inner I decided to try again to get the ball joints loose from the rod. After several hours of frustrating pounding, heating, and multiple vise acrobatics I had to give up and order the other part. That arrived the next day and I was able to get the part back on and have the tractor running in about 10 minutes. Of course I ended up paying for shipping 3 times. It was a knuckle head tax! Once the tractor was back running I turned the alfalfa hay over yesterday evening to get it to dry down some more. It was a beautiful evening. You may be able to see the rainbow in the background of the picture.
Today is supposed to be sunny so the hay should dry down quite a bit. Won't be dry enough to bale but it will dry enough that I may be able to bale tomorrow afternoon if it doesn't rain.

Today I'll be baling grass hay on a place northwest of here. I've been hauling rake, hay rack, baler and tractor this morning. We'll rake shortly and it should be ready to bale this afternoon.

Hay and Chores

This week has started a heavy hay week. We have 3 fields down across the county. One field of alfalfa at my brothers at the far north end of the county, another about midway up the county of grass, and a 28 acre field of alfalfa here. Of course the rain has started again so it looks like we won't get the hay up until the end of the week. I started cutting yesterday and got a couple of passes around the field when a tie rod end popped off of my tractor. The tie rod hooks the steering to the wheels. I couldn't quite understand why I was sliding so much til I looked down and saw one wheel steering left and the other right. I called my brother Tim and asked him if he wanted to cut some hay. I went up with my truck and a trailer and picked up his tractor. Tim finished cutting the hay well after dark. It had to come down, rain or no rain. The alfalfa was pretty close to full bloom so it was time. Next we will be cutting oat hay. We have about 50 acres of oats that are a nurse crop to the alfalfa. The nurse crop is crowding out the weeds allowing the alfalfa to grow to a size that will then keep the weeds crowded out on its own. One exciting event this morning during chores was notable. We were moving the cows across the pasture as part of our rotational grazing and one of the steers that is in their own part of the pasture decided it wanted to be in the company of the cows bad enough that it jumped the string fence. It wasn't able to jump the next string that would have allowed it in with the cows, but since we've never had any of our cattle jump the string fence it was notable. We ended up moving the steers and bull back into the paddock and we'll start the process of feeding the steers toward finishing them. The bull will be along for the ride with the steers until he's ready to go back out into the pasture with the cows later in the summer.

Calving - Avert Your Eyes If You're Squeamish!

The cows are really dropping calves now! We have really been blessed with a great calving season. We have all heifers except for one bull calf. Heifers mean we are growing our herd for the long term rather than getting bull calves that would be for short term sale. We got to watch 2 cows have calves at practically the same time. It is amazing but may not be something for the squeamish to see.

Things Break But The Farm Work Still Moves On

Like any other business things break. When they break on the farm most of the time it is up to us to fix them. Things have been extremely busy, and when things break it just adds to the excitement and pace. This past week we had a leak the main well line that we use to water our animals and our vegetables. For a while we just couldn't figure out what was going on with our well. We finally broke down and decided to call the well man. While talking to him on the phone we found the leak. The water line that is down about six feet had rubbed on the well liner and caused a leak that constantly ran the well and kept the well low enough that any major water use dropped the well water below the well pickup that caused the well to run out of water. While this was on going hay needed to be baled and chicken pens needed to be built. As the hay was being baled I had barely made a bale when the drive chain on the tractor that connects the engine to the transmission broke. So as a classic multitasking challenge I rented a backhoe and dug the water line up while waiting for the hay to dry. Then when the hay was dry enough and started to bale the chain broke on the tractor and that had to be fixed so we had to get some parts that could fix the chain. The chain repair was a study in persistence and frustration. Getting a simple pin into a chain seems so simple, until the chain is in the middle of the tractor, under the cab and requiring exact alignment and placement, covered in grease, with almost no space. I ended up using a bench grinder to make things fit. It is kind of like using a sledge hammer to make thing fit. Sometimes it's requirement but you only use it as a last resort. In the end the tractor was fixed and I was able to scrub all of the grease off of me, the water line was patched, the hay was baled, and we're still building pens.

Efficiencies

Our farm is made up of many different farm products. We grow hay, vegetables, chickens, eggs, cattle both meat and cow calf with the overall objective of having their life cycles work together. Because we have so many operations going on at one time we are constantly busy moving or preparing to move one or more of the products to the next stage of its life cycle. Like an assembly line or any other mode of production, the more you specialize on a single product or just a few similar products you can scale to larger efficiencies and limit your resources and processes to those specifically designed for your given product or products. This in general is the corn and bean farmer. There are specific tasks that need to be done, and one person using ever larger and technically specialized equipment can produce many times the amount that once took many people to produce. Well that's not us! We want our product's life cycles to efficiently interact in a symbiotic relationship to the benefit of the animal and plant products. Right now we run from one activity to the next moving chickens, making pens or harvesting hay. It makes for long days and requires jumping from one task to the next leaving things half done so that you can complete another before "it's too late". There was a small window of time to get some hay cut and baled and at the same time chicks were ready to be moved to the pasture which meant building chicken huts. They both needed to be worked at the same time so it made for long days and lots of jumping between tasks, with the normal chores needing to be done in the process. Today it's raining so we can concentrate on our planning and recuperate from the long, long work days.

First Cutting Alfalfa Pre-Bloom

On Monday the forecast was calling for rain so it looked like the alfalfa hay would have yet another week to grow but later in the day on Monday the forecast changed to two days of sun this week and cloudy until Friday when there was a chance of thunder storms. So I changed my plans and decided to cut half of my alfalfa. Here in our part of Iowa we can get at least 3 cuttings of alfalfa hay. Alfalfa is generally baled based on the bloom or flowers that you can see. Pre-bloom would be no flowers and then as the flowers appear you would go by percentage of bloom to estimate the time for harvest based on what you are trying to get from the alfalfa for nutrition vs fiber. The longer into bloom that you wait to harvest the less "nutrition" and the more fiber that is in the hay. So pre-bloom is genrally higher value but a lower yield, and into bloom and post bloom has more yield because the plant grows more stem and plant material but this offsets the nutrition in the leaves to do it. So dairy farmers like high nutrition and low fiber. Beef people like higher fiber and less nutrion. One would think that beef people would like the high nutrion, but it actually is too much for a beef can and can actually make them sick. When growing and harvesting the hay you have to harvest basted on your customers too. If you are selling to beef people you can harvest well into bloom because you get more yield and beef folks don't want all the nutrition anyway, but a dairyman will be very upset if his milk production goes down from feeding your hay. Milk is a direct result of the nutrition in the hay.

The first cutting of alfalfa usually has a larger stem and can be what is called stemmy, where there is a significant amount of stems to leaves. All of the nutrition is in the leaves so first cutting alfalfa is often considered of lower value. Since the alfalfa that I am cutting right now is a stand that has been around for quite a few years, it is already stemmy. To offset the stemmy nature of older alfalfa and of the first cutting I cut half of the hay pre-bloom. This should make the hay good for beef and horses, but not so stemmy that it gets woody. If you look at a bale that is first cutting post bloom you will have no doubt what the term woody means. It looks like you could use the hay to weave baskets.

So on Tuesday morning I cut the hay, yesterday morning I tedded (flipped it over and fluffed it up) and yesterday evening I raked it into windrows. So far so good. I'll check it for moisture once the coffee is done this morning. If the hay is 18 - 16% I'll bale. If it is higher then I'll wait for the moisture to drop. If it is less than 16% I'll wait until this evening for the dew to bring moisture back into the leaves to prevent them from shattering when I pick they hay up with the baler.

Chickens are Coming Along

It's Sharon today--who knew I would fuss so much over a bunch of chickens? Our broilers are in the brooder area in the barn. They are 2 weeks old now and are about ready to go out to the pasture. Chris and George have started building their pasture pens so they should be moving in a couple days. We had one looking a little lazy last night so I moved him to the hospital pen and am feeding him raw milk in the hopes that he is just in need of a little boost of nutrition. I watched him this morning after I put the milk in front of him. He drank quite a bit of it and then stood right up. It was like Popeye eating spinach! I hope he continues to improve. We are having problems with the well this week too--keeps running dry. That is a serious problem with all these animals as summer gets started. Calling Milford Well Service this morning and hoping for a simple fix.

Tagging Calves

We try to get the calves tagged as soon as they are on the ground, or close to it, but we've been so busy with all of the other farm activities that we missed a couple of the calves. One calf is from a heifer (now a cow) called "No Tag" because we never got an ear tag in her when she was born and we missed her when we put them through the corral last year. Why didn't we tag her when she went through the corral this year? Yeah, we thought of that too after we had them all through the corral. So this bull calf from No Tag didn't get tagged or banded to make it a steer, and another bull calf from my brother's heifer (now a cow that we call "Short Ears" because her ears have been cut back) wasn't tagged either. When we went out to look at the cows last night we saw that the bull calf from short ears was missing. We searched the usual places and still no calf. We then started checking the outside perimeter of the pasture and sure enough we found this bull calf laying outside of the fence. We gathered the bander and the ear tag and tried to sneak up on him. It was a snap. He never even tried to run. Once tagged and banded we led him back to his mother. Sharon suggested I use my belt as a halter and that was much better than holding onto this calf and letting it run with me clinging on.
This morning we saw that the last bull calf was missing along with the heifer calf that had already been tagged. We tried to sneak down and grab the untagged calf and I brought my lariat. That calf is fast and agile. He ran like the wind to the far east of the pasture. Then when we went all the way around to the east of the pasture he ran like a flash back to the west. This bull calf even made George look slow and sluggish. So this bull calf is still untagged and unbanded. Guess we'll try him another day and definitely in another way.