Hay There!

The wintry blast that brought temperatures down into the 20's killed the grass in the pasture.  The cows and goats were out grazing, but to be honest, there wasn't much to graze on.  Of course we have all the square bales of hay that we put up in the loft, but we're trying to ration that.  The square bales are some high quality bermuda hay - horse hay, that the cows love.  We give them wedges of it everyday, but we try to make it all the way through the winter.

Our 'everyday hay' is still good hay, just not quite the quality of the square bales, and we purchase it in round bales.  We buy it from a gentleman that brings it to us by trailer and drops it off at our house.  We appreciate his friendship.  His trailer holds 8 round bales and he charges $25 per bale delivered.  That is a great price, in my opinion.  Which brings me back around to the point I was trying to get to in the first paragraph.

The man who brings us hay works on an offshore oil platform and works 14 days off and 14 days on.  When I called an ordered the first 8 bales of the season, he was offshore and wouldn't hit the "beach"  until 14 days later.  Our cows were truly sorry about my timing!  Anyway, the hay got delivered last night.  I quickly rolled out 2 of the 8 bales.  The cows were ecstatic.  One bale went into the bull pen where Aussie (our Jersey bull) and Andy (our Nubian buckling) live.  The other went into the main pasture where Rosie, Clarabelle, Luna, Clarabull, and the goat family (Buckwheat, Annie, Oreo, Salt and Pepper) live.

Our hay guy places the bales outside the pasture and we only roll out one bale at a time in each location for the cows to consume.  I'll put a tarpaulin over the bales outside the pasture to protect it from the rain.  One problem that we do have with hay is that when it rains, the fire ants seek higher ground in the hay.  When we go to roll out the bales, the fire ants tear us up!

Once we roll a bale out, I put the hay ring around the bale to protect it.  Cows are notorious for wasting about as much hay as they eat.  The hay ring avoids some of the waste, but the goats enjoy jumping on top of the bale and do their very best to destroy it.  A new bale in the pasture makes egg-gathering a little bit more adventurous as the hens enjoy laying eggs in the hay.

When I first got home tonight the cows were all circled around the hay ring eating their fill.  When I checked in on them at 9 pm, they had pushed away from the supper table and were sitting down, chewing their cud.  Very happy cows now that they hay has arrived!  Last year they consumed 1 round bale about every 6 days.  We'll see if they average about the same this year.