Flooded hay

I cut hay on shares on 20 acres of river bottom land in Central Vermont. Due to the wet weather during June and July this summer I didn't get it cut before we had high water and flooding in early August. About two thirds of it went under two to five feet of water for several hours on the sixth of August. The first week in September I finally got finished on the hill and moved down there and cut the hay on the unflooded part. It was a combination of dead and down first crop, with second crop grown up through it. My old Hesston 1091 mower-conditioner made hard and slow work of it. It was sort of like mowing a sheep. I got that dry and baled, and I was planning to wait for a wet day and bush-hog the rest of it and call it finished for the year. HOWEVER, the landowner had other ideas. "$$$$Somebody will buy it for mulch!!$$$$." SO, he got his neighbor to come down with a discbine and lay down every thing that was left. The pictures show the flood,
and then the dust storm that resulted when I baled the hay. The woman in the first picture is standing on the road behind where the two wagons are parked in the third baling picture.
My tractor looks as if I had been cultivating, not haying.
We put half the bales in his barn, sold two loads off the wagon, and stacked the res in the field with a tarp over it. I last handled any of it on Saturday, and even though we all wore masks, I am still coughing and sniffling and feeling poorly.

from the pictures the hay doesnt look bad at all.

Here is 3 pictures of a area that flooded. When the fields flooded the cows and horses broke threw the fence to get to high ground.
It was a total mess. Thousands of cows on a 4 lane highway and no place to put them because all the fields were flooded in the area.

<a href="http://www.rieckesbaysidegallery.com/programfiles/talers/193_09-15-08%20Horses%20and%20Cattle%20on%20Hwy%2023.pdf">Big file</a> may take a few seconds to load. 3 pictures.

The hay was dusty because of all the residual dried mud on the grass? Did that make a difference on the selling price of the hay?

from the way it is raked up you can tell it has problems. I hope you got enough out of it to compensate you time and trouble. At least it is off the field for next year.

You're lucky that neighbor came along! He got you out of that dust, if it were mine he could have it all.

I wouldn't feed hay that has all that flood dust/dirt on it to my livestock good way to make them sick

I hate to think what that grit did to the bearing and such on the baler!

Gene

The hay is going to be mulch/constuction hay only. We are advertising it as such, FREE TOPSOIL INCLUDED. If I am lucky I will get the value of my fuel and fertilizer back out of it. The landowner paid the neighbor to mow it, but I did the rest of the job. I was really hoping that right after it was mowed, some dirtbag would drop a cigarette! This ground gets flooded at least one year in three, but this is the first time it has happened at a time when there was still a heavy crop on the ground. Most years it will be during spring breakup, so all I have to do is check for debris.

In 1998 it happened just after I finished the first cut. I woke up to heavy rain, and thought little of it except that I wouldn't be able to work outdoors that day. Then the landowner' wife called and said "David just went don to pull your tractor out of the river."
"EXCUUUSE ME, that tractor was a quarter mile from the river."
"Not any more."
He got the tractor, but I had two rakes, a tedder, and one hay wagon that sat through it. From the shore you couldn't see the tedder at all, the rakes were just a slight disturbance in the water, and the wagon was in up to the bottom of the deck. After the water went down, we cleaned everything up, repacked the wheel bearings and greased the snot out of every thing, and it seemed to come through it all right.

I have already told the landowner that I will never do this again. If a heavy crop gets flooded it will be bush-hogged or plowed under, and if he thinks otherwise, somebody else can deal with it. He travels a lot on business, and if he had been gone that week he would have come back to find it all knocked down, and my equipment long gone.

That stuff HAD to have mold in it. Definitely NOT good for anyones health.