Saving it For Later

Canning.  Pickling.  Freezing.  Lacto-Fermentation.  Dehydrating.  Some of the ways that we preserve the harvest when we can't eat it all at once.  It's a good thing there are all these methods of preserving for us.  As it turns out, some things will save for later when it comes to the four-legged animals on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm - like hay.

October is historically a dry month, but this year so was July, August, and September.  The grass has died.  It crackles underfoot.  Normally, the grass is still growing, even if it has gone to seed.  The cows and goats rummage around out on the pasture and try to find something to eat, but there's nothing to be had.  Normally, there's grass out there for them until the first frost in late November.

Two months ago we picked up 75 square bales of hay that we put up in the barn loft.  The loft is like a pantry or a root cellar for the cows.  The hay sits up there until the cold fronts blow through.  The creaky sounds of the weathervane spinning up on the roof of the barn signals the arrival of fall or winter.  And then, at the urging of the gentle moo-ing of the cows, square bales are lowered from the loft into the stalls and rationed out over the winter.

We also purchase round bales, 10 per year to be precise.  We cover them with tarps to keep them dry as they sit right outside the pasture.  Actually, it's not really a tarp.  It's a used vinyl billboard that gets recycled when it fades and comes down off the big poles on the side of the interstate, and it works perfectly.  We just turn the tarp to the other side so the ad for the ambulance chasing lawyer is facing downward.

Normally, we don't roll out bales of hay until December or maybe even January, but this year?  Well, I've already rolled some out for the hungry cows and goats that can't get nourishment from a drought stricken pasture.  From the 10 bales we bought last year, there's four left.  I have called Mr. Broussard and reserved 10 more round bales for delivery in November or December.  The cows hear the creaky gate open and watch from afar as I roll a bale into the pasture.  Then they run as quickly as they can to the spot under the pecan trees where we feed hay.

I like to watch the cows with a new bale of hay.  When a fresh bale is out, they circle it, and then start rubbing against it with their necks.  Finally, they'll start eating from the very center of the bale.  I figure that to a cow, the center of the hay bale is like the center of a cinnamon roll for humans.  Yum!

There's an outside chance that we could get a rain shower or two that might perk up the grass and get some growing, but in the next 10 days, the forecast only shows 5% chance of precipitation.  It looks like from here on out, it will be round bales of hay, square bales of hay and the occasional trough of sweet feed.  Almost forgot, we'll be harvesting sweet potatoes soon and we'll feed them all of the sweet potato vines.  Cows absolutely love that!  I'm also going to be planting a large patch of turnips.  Once January comes, the cows will enjoy the turnip roots and greens.

Rolling Out the First Bale - DEC 2025

On December 7th we rolled out the first round bale for the cows and goats.  They were happy to see the gate open.  Thanks to the lime, our pasture held up really good this year.  We had a fair amount of grass, even when neighboring ranchers' grass was poor.  I give the lime application the credit.  We'll do it again this spring.  By December, however, the animals had eaten the grass down and were anxious for the hay they know we have stockpiled for the winter fight outside the fence.

Each year we purchase 10 round bales from a gentleman who delivers them to our home for $40 per bale.  We roll them out in a double row on the property line between our house and the neighbor to the east of us.  We cover it with a tarp.  We noticed that we need to buy a new tarp as ours are in rough shape and did a mediocre job of protecting the quality of the hay.  We were using a really old repurposed outdoor advertising vinyl billboard sign and also a tarp from Harbor Freight that disintegrated.  I'm making calls to Lamar Outdoor Advertising to see if they have any old vinyl signs for sale that I can use as a tarp.

The hay ring is a must to try to keep the hay protected and attempts to keep waste to a minimum.  However, the cows and goats are especially messy eaters.  They waste about a quarter of each bale, pulling it out, dropping it on the ground, stepping on it and then pooping and peeing on it.  The goats, once about half of the bale is eaten, like to hop on top of the bale and sleep.  Of course, they poop on it and then the cows and goats won't eat it.  I'm thinking about putting up a gate and only allow them access to the hay for short periods during the day, so that they only eat and don't lounge around.

We have about 68 square bales in inventory in the hay loft and (now) nine round bales in inventory for the winter.  I'll be calling the gentleman who sells us the round bales for another order of 10 bales in a month or two.  We've found that a round bale lasts about six days before they animals have finished as much as they are going to eat.  We feed them a little sweet feed over the winter, but if they're not in milk, we generally just make sure they have hay to eat.  I do have plenty of turnips planted in the garden to feed them as well.

Make Hay While the Sun Shines

Timely rains coupled with the positive effects of the first year in 24 that we limed the pasture resulted in plenty of grass in our pasture. We are a small homestead farm, raising animals to primarily feed our family.  Allan Nation, of Stockman Grass Farmer, once said, "Don't measure success by acres owned or animals counted-measure it by the health of your soil, the resilience of your land and the life it sustains."  In short, he's saying, you're not an animal farmer, you're a grass farmer!

When grass stops growing, you've got to still have grass in a stockpile.  We do that by purchasing hay.  Each year we buy hay from two sources - a neighbor down the road grows good Bermuda hay that he primarily grows for horses.  It is usually clean and the cows and goats enjoy eating it in the cold days of winter when there's not a green blade growing.  We also buy round bales from a rancher who grows quality Bermuda hay and follows the principles of Allan Nation, resulting in the production of reliable hay.

We got the call from the neighbor growing round bales that they would be baling the following afternoon.  If we pick it up behind the baler, it's $7 per bale.  If we pick it up from their barn, it's $9 per bale.  You already know which option we chose.  It's funny how things change in a year.  Last year, following my heart surgery, I was out of commission, unable to lift hay.  My Dad, my brother-in-law, my sons, my wife, and my brother-in-laws sons had my back - literally, as they got the hay in the barn.  This year, all healed up, Tricia and I hooked up the cattle trailer and made the mile drive to the neighbor's hay field.  They had started baling at 12:30 pm and had around 100 bales already on the ground.

This year, the neighbor had a new baler.  The bales were smaller, but tightly packed.  I liked the fact that he had affixed Old Glory to the back of his baler and the flag was blowing in the wind.  I'm glad to give my money to Patriotic Americans proud of their country and still working and enjoying an agricultural way of life.  We had originally purchased from the neighbor's grandfather, who has now passed on, but his grandson picked up the hay baling responsibilities and was carrying on the responsibilities.

Tricia drove the truck.  It is a 2000 model Toyota PreRunner with 254,000 miles still going strong.  It still blows cool air, and that's important for the driver, my wife, who wasn't enthused about me trying to get a photo of her.

She was pulling the cattle trailer.  I think it is a 1976 model, originally painted a goldish-yellow color, and was my grandfather's.  It has some rust and is showing its age, but it still gets the job done.  As Tricia drove between the bales, my job was to load the trailer with bales of hay.  The hay had been cut the day before, cured in the sun, fluffed and now, it was baled.

We still have 16 square bales from last year, so according to our calculations, we'd need 60 bales to get our inventory where we want it to be in the hay loft.  We got our 60 bales loaded in just under 30 minutes, paid the neighbor, and drove back to the house.

The job was far from over though.  Now, we had to get it up in the loft.  We backed the trailer up to the barn, affixed the pulley and rope to the 4x4 that is positioned over the door.  The rope has a bungee cord with hooks on one end.  I lower the rope, Tricia hooks a hay bale on and I pull it up to the loft.  The other end of the rope has a circle on it.  When I pull it up, I put the circle over a nail I have driven in a rafter.

The sun was going down and we had to work fast.

With the circle over a nail, the bale is held in place, allowing me to run to the edge and unhook the hay bale.

I slide each bale down to the end of the loft and begin stacking it.  The 2x12 lumber that makes up the floor of the loft has been rubbed smooth over the years by hay sliding across it.  If my math is right (that's a big if), this will have been our 18th year of putting up hay in the loft.

We count as we go and before the sun went down, the 60th bale came up the pulley!

We had previously dropped down the 16 bales still remaining from last year's crop into a stall in the barn.  Using LIFO (last in first out) accounting method, we'll use the old hay first in feeding this winter.

All the hay is packed nicely up in the loft.  We can get 3 bales stacked across and four high or 12 bales per stack.  It fits snugly, but nicely up there.

It was good to get the job done.  Tricia and I slept good that night.  After a hard day's work, a sound sleep in a comfortable bed is a relaxing and rewarding experience.  You put up stores while the weather is nice in preparation for upcoming days when the weather won't be nice.  Joseph did this same thing in Genesis when he put up grain in the 7 years of plenty in preparation for 7 years of famine that would affect Egypt and surrounding countries.  God gave him wisdom and in so doing, many lives were saved.  You gotta make hay while the sun shines.

Round Bale Delivery

How are you at rationing things?  You know, like that half gallon of ice cream in the freezer or that homemade cheesecake in the refrigerator that you want to make last for a while.  Well, we do the same thing with hay.  We have a finite amount of hay and when the grass in the pasture is gone in the winter, we have to manage our resources of hay.  We have 75 square bales of Bermuda up in the hay loft and 10 round bales lined up right outside the pasture gate.

In normal years, we can't count on the grass in the pasture to come in strong so that we don't supplement with hay until right around May.  At about the second week of March, we had run out of round bales.  I think we have around 36 square bales up in the loft.  I made a call to a friend that sells me round bales for a delivery.  He told me it was a good thing that I called as he was just taking inventory of his hay stocks in his barn and had exactly 10 bales left.

Mr. Broussard loaded up 10 bales on his truck and delivered them to me.  We rolled them off of his truck and I lined them up between the wood chip mulch piles and the cattle trailer.  While inflation might be raging elsewhere, his price ($40 per bale) was the same as it was last year.  After unloading, I paid him and had him walk to the garden as I gave him a big bag of mustard greens.

Mr. Broussard manages his hay field expertly, taking soil samples and amending the soil with whatever it needs.  The hay is clean and weed-free.  Once he bales it, he stores it indoors in a barn where it is dark so the sun can't damage it.  It is dry in his barn.  The hay arrives in pristine condition.

As it turns out, the lime applied to our pasture appears to be helping out the pasture.  As a result, the grass is coming in earlier than normal.  All the cows, goats and chickens spend all day in the pasture with heads down, eating.  As it stands now, I won't be needing any of these 10 bales until much later this fall.

That leads to a challenge for us.  We don't have a barn to store the bales inside and in the dark and away from moisture.  The best that we can do is cover it up tightly with tarps.  That's what we began to do, covering it and staking the tarps down with tent pegs so the tarps stay secured on top of the hay, sealing it off from rain, sun, and wind.

It normally takes the cows and goats around a week to finish off a round bale.  So we have at least 10 weeks of inventory of round bales, meaning we shouldn't need any additional round bales until perhaps February of 2026.  In the meantime, we'll continue working our way through the 36 square bales as we'll be taking delivery of more square bales in a couple months.  

Round Bales Delivered

On Saturday we were finishing up with the fire pit patio when I received a call from a friend who sells us round bales of hay for the cows.  He is quite a guy.  The price of the hay is the same price per bale as last year.  Considering the inflationary times we live in and the fact that we've been in a drought and hay is really hard to come by, I really appreciate that.  He delivers it to our house and we roll it off his trailer.  He brings us 10 bales at a time and it is good hay.  When he drove up, the cows saw the hay on the back of the trailer and started mooing... loudly.  

Once we rolled them off the truck.  I rolled one bale to LuLu and her bull calf, Nicky, in the separate pasture.  The other bale was rolled out for Rosie, Elsie and the goats.  Needless to say they were exuberant.  For the remaining 8 bales, I store those outside the pasture and prior to the next rain (if it ever rains again), I'll cover them up with a big tarp.

In the foreground, you can see one of the bales and if you look in the background in the distance above the sugar cane and against the woods, you can see the bale for LuLu and Nicky.  All the animals began eating their fill.  Later that afternoon, they sat in the shade and chewed their cud, happy and full.

We got to talking to Benton about the drought and lack of forage for the cows.  He brought out something that I hadn't thought of.  He said, "In a year like this with minimal forage, it prematurely ages the cows."  I thought about that for a minute and then he explained.  When the cows don't have much grass to eat, they eat right near the ground.  This is hard on them and hard on their teeth, causing considerable wear and even loss of teeth.  That ages them and hurts their ability to get nutrition and their condition isn't quite what it should be.  As I thought about it, there's another issue as well.  When cows eat close to the ground, they pick up more parasites.  Not good for their health.

Now that we've got round bales out for the animals to eat on at will, we can slow down (or stop) feeding them the square bales that we have stored up in the loft.  We've been feeding them that hay since August.  We've never done that before.  In fact, normally, we don't feed them square bales until late November.  We've gone through a lot of that inventory already and have winter ahead of us.  We'll have to try to ration.  Cows and goats are notorious about wasting hay.  It aggravates me to no end! 

With that in mind, I think I'll plant some more turnips for the girls.  They'll need some fresh greens and turnip roots to supplement the hay and little bit of sweet feed we give them once the cold winds start to blow.

The Hay Gets 'Em Through

 

This photo was taken about a month ago.  It was warmer, with temperatures reaching up to 90 degrees.  Today, the weather has changed.  It was in the 30's this morning with a brisk north wind.  There was a light frost on the ground and then the rain began to fall.  We always say, "The animals don't mind the cold and they don't mind the rain, but when it is BOTH cold and rainy, then they have trouble."

When the temps fall, the grass stops growing and the animals clip down every blade of grass in the pasture.  They depend upon the hay we give them.  A month or two ago, we reported how we put 70 square bales up on the hay loft in the barn.  We keep round bales out in the hay ring so that they can free choice eat at their leisure.  Normally a round bale will last a week, but now that we have Nick, the bull, here with us, the round bales don't last that long.  He's a big dude.

Speaking of Nick, we're thinking that Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu are bred, so we'll be trying to load Nick in the cattle trailer to return him to where he's from.  Hopefully we'll be successful.  He isn't halter-broken, so it's not as easy as putting a lead rope on him and walking him into the trailer.  We'll have to get creative and coax him into the trailer with some sweet feed in a bucket.  If we're not successful, we'll have to borrow some cattle panels and build a corral.

Back to the hay, I've arranged for a friend to deliver us 8 round bales at some point next week.  Once Nick is gone, that should last us through December and the better part of January.  In addition to the round bales, we'll begin giving them square bales each day along with sweet feed.  We generally ration the square bales so that it lasts until the spring grass comes in.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

A good friend of mine that lives up in Arkansas recently emailed to tell me that he read on the blog where we were putting up hay and it brought back a lot of childhood memories from when his Dad had cattle.  He mentioned that they were baling hay up in Arkansas and what a beautiful sight it was to see fresh mown hay on hillsides being baled into round bales.  

He's right.  There's something about hay fields that is just downright nice to look at.  I think it is the uniformity of it.  Previously, it was a rough and tangle field of tall grass.  All at once it is mowed close to the ground, raked up and baled, leaving the field looking like a putting green on a golf course.  

Last week, I posted about The Hay Field in Front.  We sat out on the front porch and watched as the neighbor baled hay.  It was late afternoon and he was trying to get as much baled before the sun went down.  The round bales were scattered across the field. A nice pastoral sight, to be sure.

The guy on that John Deere tractor was making things happen.  "Gotta make hay while the sun shines." is a country quote meaning that you've got to work hard to get things done in any short window you can.  As you can see, the sun was sinking quickly.  I'm sure he was listening to some country music in his air conditioned tractor, comfortable and safely away from the heat and dust.

We sat out on the front porch and watched until he turned his lights on.  There was no sense in pushing it, so he drove to his truck, got out of the tractor and called it a day.  "It'll be here for me tomorrow," I'm sure he said.

The very next day, he did finish up baling up all the hay in the field.  I counted up 96 bales.  He unhooked the baler and put hay forks on the front and back of the tractor and drove across the field time and again, stacking all the hay against the road.  Then a truck and trailer showed up and he loaded all the hay on the trailer.  The hay was then moved off site for storage or sale.

Everyone up and down the road is putting up hay.  Cutting, raking, fluffing, baling.  We haven't had rain in a few weeks and there's a tropical storm about to enter the Gulf.  Gotta make hay while the sun shines.

Round or Square?

I don't know if you're like us, but we have routines -daily, weekly, monthly and annually.  Routines make us feel comfortable.  We are familiar with the events.  No surprises.  Routines are cyclical.  You can almost set your watch by them.  Normally by this time, we have 100 square bales of hay stacked tightly in the hayloft of our barn that you can see below.  Retrieving the hay from the neighbor's field is hard work and getting it into the loft is even harder.

This year, as it seems, the two months of hurricanes have put a stick in the spokes of our cyclical year routine of putting up hay.  Several years ago we posted THIS POST about getting hay in the barn.  Our neighbors down the road weren't able to get the amount of cuttings in due to the hurricanes and that left their supply of hay woefully short.  It looks like we may not have any square bales this year.

But, as in year's past, we also purchase round bales of hay from another gentleman who lives about four miles north and east of our place.  He has a trailer that fits eight round bales on it.  I email him and as soon as he is able, he hooks up his tractor and delivers the eight bales to our little farm.  We got our first delivery of the season on Wednesday afternoon.

The hay man stacked the hay in a straight row right in front of the gate.  Since I don't have a tractor, this serves a practical purpose.  As soon as the cows are in need of another bale of hay, I'll swing the gate open and roll the first bale out to the hungry cattle.  The grass in the pasture is dwindling and at this time in the growing season, the grass isn't as nutritious as it once was.  The cows will soon need a bale.

We will do our best to protect this hay.  Tomorrow, I will place a tarpaulin over the bales to protect them from getting rained on in order to preserve the quality.

We've learned that a round bale of hay usually lasts about 6 days; however, it will be less this year.  Our two bulls are much larger and will consume more hay quickly.  At the end of December, they both go to the butcher shop.  After that, a hay bale will last longer.

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.

Picking Up Hay - 2018 Edition

Hay is a very important feed source for our cows during wintertime when no grass is growing.  This year, due to a very wet summer, hay is in short supply.  We feed our cows hay that we get from two sources.  Last year we got 32 round bales from a neighbor who delivers them in lots of eight when he comes in every two weeks from working offshore.  The cows can usually demolish a round bale in about 6 days.  They would kill it off sooner if we didn't put the hay ring around it, but they would waste most of it.  The hay ring definitely cuts down significantly on waste.  We haven't purchased any round bales yet this year, but I have eight on order and they should be delivered during the middle of next week.

We also get square bales of hay from another neighbor down the road who charges $5 a bale picked up in the field behind the baler.  Normally, we pick it up in May or June.  This year they didn't get many cuttings due to all the rain and we just picked up 39 bales this weekend and the remaining 61 on Tuesday afternoon.  Tricia drives the truck in the hay field, Benjamin is in the trailer stacking the hay, Russ is picking up the hay and bringing it to the trailer.  I am the guy taking pictures and if you want to know what Russ is saying, he's saying, "Put down the camera and come help, Dad."

In late November at least it is not as hot as it is in summer when we are normally doing this.

We can normally load about 75 bales in both the trailer and the truck.  We had loaded up 39 bales and then... the truck tires started spinning.  We got stuck in the middle of the field.  Our neighbor came and pulled us out, but we decided to not rut up his field.  He picked it all up with a trailer and we'd pick up the remaining bales from his barn as soon as we could get it.  That ended up being Tuesday night when Tricia and Benjamin went and got it.

Since it was too wet to actually drive in our pasture to the barn with the hay, we moved the 39 bales 3 at a time in a wagon to the barn.  Not very efficient, I know.  I climb up in the loft and we have a pulley that we use to hoist the bales into the loft.

We have a bungee cord tied to the end and Benjamin would attach it to the baling twine on the hay bale.

I use the pulley to pull the hay up to the loft.  Using a ring fastened to the top end of the rope, I run the ring through a nail I have hammered into the barn rafters.  This holds the bale in place while I walk to the bale, pull it into the loft and unfasten the bungee strap and send it back down to repeat the whole process.

We got 39 bales in the barn loft this weekend.  Tonight Tricia and Benjamin unloaded the hay in the garage.  We'll give the ground a few days to dry up and then we'll bring all this hay out to the barn to store in the loft.

The cows will be happy to eat all this hay.  We'll be happy when all the work is done and "the hay is in the barn!"

Last Year's Hay

It is the middle of February and a week ago the cows ate all of the remaining inventory of hay.  I called the gentleman that sells us round bales and delivers it, but he happened to be offshore working.  He works 14 days out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.  We supplemented with the square bales of bermuda hay that we keep up in the loft.  When our hay man hit the beach, he called me with some bad news, "I'm completely out of the hay from this year that I have been selling you, Kyle."

He did have some good news, though.  He told me that he had started feeding his cows last year's hay.  Last year was a very good year for hay and he had some still stacked up in the back.  He said his cows were eating it and he'd sell it to me at a discount.  I asked him to bring me 8 round bales and he delivered them to the house and put one in the pasture.  With all the rain, I immediately covered the 7 bales with a billboard sign that we use as a tarpaulin.

The hay looked kind of "iffy," but once the weathered outer layer was removed, the inside of the bale was fresh and looked like it was baled yesterday.  The cows loved it and absolutely devoured the bale that was out in the pasture.  All's well that ends well.  There is only one little problem.  Since the round bales are last year's hay, they've settled and aren't round any more.  They are flat on the bottom and as a result, they won't roll.  I had Russ and Benjamin help me and we couldn't budge them.

But we're not quitters.  Though we can't roll the bale, we can unroll it and bring armfuls of hay to the cows.  That's exactly what we did.  Obviously this wouldn't work with a herd any bigger than ours, but with our little animal family, this will work.

They hay ring is only about 60 feet from where the hay is stacked, so we don't have far to carry it easily to them.  The cows are happy.  We are happy.

Daisy, Luna, and Rosie are thankful to have the all you can eat hay buffet open.  Clarabelle and the little bulls are still in the barn, but they'll all be here soon.

These 8 round (flattened) bales will last about 40 days.  We will purchase some square bales that a buddy has stored up to use after that to tide things over until the spring grasses come in. 

Hay for the Day

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.  - Freeman Dyson

I read that quote in James Wesley, Rawles' book, "Founders" and began thinking about it deeper.  That is because we have just started to feed our cows strictly hay. We'll feed round bales of bahia all throughout the winter and will shortly supplement with square bales of a higher quality Bermuda hay. The grass in the pasture is mostly eaten and that remaining is void of nutrition.  Ruminants need something to eat over the winter and hay fits the bill. Our animals are going through a round bale in about 6 days.  They certainly let us know when the bale is gone by mooing... loudly!

The quote above the picture is interesting.  According to the hay theory, the invention of hay allowed civilization to progress.  I guess I can see that, and I am not nearly as learned as the physicist who was quoted above, but I have several questions about his assertion regarding the invention of hay:

First, even if hay wasn't invented, couldn't people have stored grains or root crops over the winter when grass was unavailable in order to move society to Northern and Western Europe?

Next, the statement about the invention of hay taking place during the Dark Ages has me scratching my head.  Cato the Elder (234-139 BCE), PRIOR TO THE DARK AGES - mentions hay in 'De Agri Cultura', LIII:

"Cut hay in season, and be careful not to wait too long. Harvest before the seed ripens, and store the best hay by itself for the oxen to eat during the spring ploughing, before you feed clover."

Finally, the Holy Bible mentions hay often.  In fact, in a very timely example, the Virgin Mary gave birth to our Saviour, Jesus Christ, wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger as there was no room for them in the inn.  What is a manger?  It is a feed trough - and most nativity scenes you see will show the Baby Jesus lying in a manger filled with...hay!

Maybe there's some context to the hay theory that I'm missing?  Regardless of the timing of hay coming on the scene, our cows are certainly happy that it exists at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm!

Rolling up the Paddocks

After ignoring the hay for the past three months, the cows went through the last round bale I had on hand very quickly.  As you can see, there's nothing left.  I called the gentleman that I purchase my hay from and asked him to please deliver me 8 more bales.  At this time of the year, the grass in the pasture falls off in terms of quality as it goes to seed and its nutritional content is not as good.  So the cows begin to eat hay again.

The gentleman I buy hay from told me that he would and then went on to tell me that he's had a rough 3 months.  First, he told me that the tremendous rainfall during August diminished the quality of the hay as well as his yield.  Then a connecting rod went out in his tractor.  Then his hay rake broke and was beyond economic repair so he had to get a new one.  Finally, his baler caught fire and burned to the ground and he barely got the tractor unhooked and moved or it would have burned too.  Those are some tough breaks.

Up to this point, I still had the pasture partitioned off into different paddocks by temporary electric fencing using reels and fiberglass temporary step-in posts.  I move the cows to new paddock to eat fresh grass every two days and that allows the grass to rest and regrow before introducing the cows to it again.

At this time of year however, it is time to roll up all the fencing and allow the cows to have free choice to roam wherever they want to on the pasture and eat whatever grass they want.  The reels to roll up the poly wire make the rolling up process quick and efficient.

Upon opening a new paddock, the girls always rush out to dine on fresh grass. From this point on (until next spring), they can go wherever they wish.

You can see how in some places they've eaten the grass down to the ground.  This is not really a good thing as that is how they pick up parasites.  In other places, you can see how the grass is overgrown and not eaten.  In some of these cases, there is cow poop underneath it.  In others, the grass just got too tall and tough and now the cows won't eat it.

I finally rolled up the final cross-wire and the six paddocks is now only one big 3 acre one.

The cows now have 3 acres upon which to roam and graze.  The cooler temperatures and dry conditions tell me that the grass isn't going to grow much more now and that the cows will still graze, but they will now get most of their nutritional needs met from the round hay bales.

As of right now, I don't think I'm going to supplement their pasture and hay by planting rye grass.  I haven't had much success with rye grass due to the fact that the pasture is in dire need of lime.   Over the course of the next month or so, the cows will have access to the whole pasture and they will clip it down.  No worries, though, my order of hay will be delivered later in the week.