All Good Things Must Come to an End

The cupboard is bare!

The Empty Hay Loft

Early last week I climbed the ladder into the hay loft and threw the very last bale of Jiggs Bermuda hay down for the cows.  It echoes up there now.  Cavernous.  Empty. Like the Aesop's fable of the Ant & the Grasshopper, in the summer we (the ants) work very hard to put up hay for the cows knowing that even though it is sweltering, winter is coming and the cows will need hay.  We stack the bales of hay 3 bales wide and four bales high and it fills the loft until no more will fit.  Then we don't touch it until December.

We know how many bales of hay we have in inventory in the barn and we know how many days until Spring arrives.  We ration the hay in the loft and give the cows round bales free choice.  The square bales in the loft are a higher quality hay and our cows are hay aficionados.  They smell the hay, sampling it for aroma and then taste it, letting it linger on their tongues.  They tell me that the hay has hints of apricot, blackberry, and finishes with a smooth oakiness to it.  (Joking)  They are spoiled, though.

For several days after we had fed them the last of the square bales, they waited in the same spot where we would bring it to them after cutting off the baling twine. Only none came.  It was all gone. The cows moo'd in a melancholy tone.  Finally, defeated, they ambled off to the round bale and began picking at it slowly.

Oh well, a few days in the seventies and I can see the grass growing.  The cows have been increasingly in the pasture, heads down, eating, but for now they are eating it as fast as it grows.  We also have been rotating them throughout various sections of our yard.  We've fed them all of the turnips and I'll start feeding them Mammoth Mangel beets probably this weekend.  In short course, the grass will come in strong and I'll put up the cross-fences to separate our pasture into paddocks for our rotational grazing program.

The life of a farmer is filled with cycles - the seasons, the annual sowing and reaping, routines, just like clockwork.  Last week we pulled the last square bale down from the hay loft.  I passed by our neighbor's beautiful hay field the other day.  The Bermuda is thick and green and putting on nice growth during this first week of Spring.  Before we know it we'll be stacking hay back up in the loft...