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.