Bringing in the hay

About a year and a half ago, we found a good deal on hay. We bought 4.5 tons for a decent price.

This was long before we had our cows, of course, but hay stored under cover does fine for a couple of years (meaning, it doesn’t lose much of its nutritional value).

This hay fed our cows all through the winter, but we knew in advance it wouldn’t be enough to get them through the lean early-spring time, so we’ve been keeping an eye out for another good deal.

We found it. A local farmer was selling “okay”-quality hay in 500-lb. round bales. Round bales aren’t our first choice, but the price was right, so we bought three tons (12 bales).

The farmer was able to deliver them (which was nice, since we don’t have the means to transport a lot of hay), and Don was able to offload the bales from the man’s flatbed and place them next to the driveway for the night.

The next day, Don moved the bales. He used tines attached to front of the bucket…

…to stab a bail and hoist it up.

One by one, he transported the bales up the lower driveway to the barn area.

He stacked them neatly in an area heavy with gravel (meaning, good drainage). We anchored one side with a railroad tie to keep the bales from rolling.

The other side has cinder blocks to accomplish this task.

Then, since rain was threatening, we fetched a large tarp and got it over the hay and anchored.

This hay has some discolored spots, but it’s not moldy. We can discard any parts that aren’t good and feed the cows with the rest.

We didn’t store the hay in the barn because, at the moment, we don’t have room. Not only do we still have some bales left from our first batch, but the barn was messy and disorganized after a winter of shoving things “temporarily” under cover and then leaving them there. (The totes of Christmas items was still on the floor instead of up in the loft, for example.)

For the last couple days, Don has been cleaning the barn with a vengeance, and it’s looking vastly improved. He still has a lot of anonymous totes and crates that even now, four years after moving here, hasn’t been sorted. He suspects most of it is junk and will get discarded, but of course he needs to go through them all to confirm.

At any rate, this hay will last us well into the warm months when the grass in our pasture will be tall enough to let the cows graze without supplementing.

In all our years of rural living, raising and baling our own hay is one thing we’ve never been able to do. We’ve never had the acreage, the equipment, or the money. We accept this limitation and know that purchasing hay is just one of the things we’ll have to do each year.

Additionally, this is one of the few planned purchases we had in mind following my job loss and our subsequent financial “tightening of the belt.” Under no circumstances would we ever allow our animals to suffer.

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2025/03/bringing-in-hay.html