Thought I''d share a success story...

Just thought I'd share a success story. Even though I'm REAL small scale, I think it shows what a difference a scientific approach makes in hay making.

I've got about 10 acres of tillable land. I pasture about 3 or 4 and make hay off the rest. For years I had a neighbor make the hay for me. Didn't do much input. Every now and then I'd have a generic shot of fertilizer spread.

A few years ago, I started doing the hay myself with some old equipment and the help of some of my inlaws who grew up on farms but no longer farm. They kind of like "playing farm" a couple of times a year and it's become kind of a nice chance for everybody to come together and use some old equipment. I cut and rake with a Ford 960, and my wife's uncle brings his old Case tractor to bale with.

I finally decided I was going to take my "good field" (about 5 acres) and get a little more scientific about the process. I had soil testing done. Fertilized based on the reports. That helped, but I had a bad problem with weeds due to years of neglect, so this spring I had it sprayed to knock out the bedstraw and other weeds. First cutting was pretty nice. Put another shot of nitrogen on after 1st cutting. Just put up second cutting yesterday. Best hay I've ever put up. Orchard / timothy grass with almost zero weeds. Took 270 small squares off the 5 acres (just a few years ago, before putting some money into the field, I was getting about 100 second cutting bales off the same field).

Next, I'm going to start working on my smaller field (only 3 or 4 acres) and get that producing better as well.

Even though it's just a hobby for me, I find it very interesting.

The last picture shows my 2 boys and their great grandfather who's been battling some health problems this past year, but couldn't miss coming out to oversee the haymaking.
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nice job! third time trying to post this , dam computer just cuts out for no reason and looses stuff. keep loosing my train of thought. but
ya thats the way i kinda do stuff and have time to smell the roses and work at your own pace and enjoy things. just came in from baling my
few acres of timothy i cut on sunday.
 
Now if only we could get anybody to actually learn what they are and how it works instead of watching tv and looking at Facebook
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That’s good all the way around, even has my favorite tractor in it!

Thanks for posting.

Paul
 
Can't have good outputs without correct inputs, remember fertilizer is not a one shot deal, you have to repeat almost every year if you want results.
 
I will show this to my buddy. I cut his
hay. Almost a waste of time. 120 bales
off 6-7 acres. Needs fertilizer. He says
no. Great pictures. Live to see other
families working together. Nice 960! My
favorite tractor
 
I think you got good warnings that badly maintained hay is not worth the effort to bale. It takes same amount of YOUR effort to put it up.
 
(quoted from post at 04:48:13 07/29/20) ... remember fertilizer is not a one shot deal, you have to repeat almost every year if you want results.

Yes, this is year 3 or 4 of the process of bringing the fields back into good production. Last year didn't go so well. My wife had an accident and lots of things got put on the back shelf for the summer, including fertilizer. This year with the addition of spraying for weeds in addition to fertilizing according to soil tests, everything started to come together nicely. I'll do soil tests again later this summer to figure out my fertilizer plans for next year.
 
(quoted from post at 06:19:02 07/29/20) I will show this to my buddy. I cut his
hay. Almost a waste of time. 120 bales
off 6-7 acres. Needs fertilizer. He says
no. Great pictures. Live to see other
families working together. Nice 960! My
favorite tractor

Hi Kevin! Sometimes it's just what a person really wants or needs that dictates their choices. Even when I wasn't really paying much attention to my "inputs" and "outputs" I still got enough hay to meet my needs (feeding a few horses), so I didn't really see the need to pay more money to produce more hay than I needed. Plus, back then I was paying somebody to make hay off my land for me, and was paying by the bale, so lots of "extra" bales got pretty expensive since I didn't really have any interest in trying to sell hay (strangely, you'd be surprised how small and light the bales were you were paying by the bale haha, but hardly anybody in my area was doing small squares, so I was kind of short on options).

When it became impossible to get anybody to do my hay in small squares, I started to collect some older equipment to do most of the work myself, and this is when I started to take more interest in the process and to take more pride in producing better quality hay. I now have enough hay that I can meet my own needs; give some to my wife's uncle for his pony; and some to my brother for their 2 horses (in return for their help in making hay). By next year I will probably start producing more hay than I can use and hope to be able to sell at least a couple hundred bales to help offset the cost of fertilizer, which has been a pretty big investment to get to this point.

Another pic of the last, small load coming in. Me and my 2 boys as well as my father in law.

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Nice story about how you improved your production and kept the family involved in farming. It's great that your kids still have a connection to their great grand-dad and can share all this.
Gerrit
 

Well, he did say he had the soil sampled and analyzed BEFORE he fertilized. I'll assume they would have suggested lime as needed.
 
(quoted from post at 14:47:37 07/29/20)
Well, he did say he had the soil sampled and analyzed BEFORE he fertilized. I'll assume they would have suggested lime as needed.

Yep. Lime is being addressed. Pelletized lime put on this spring. Spreading ag lime this fall.
 

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