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.