Help, Please! Oat Hay-Pasture Mix Dry Time & Other Quest

Hello again,
I'm still pretty new to all the details of growing & harvesting my own pasture mix. I had posted a couple of weeks ago, asking if I should cut my oats green because the pasture mix had caught up to the oats & was a little weedy. So, I was finally able to get it cut down (sickle mower - no crimper) on Sat. I raked on Mon. & baled a little last night. Did I jump the gun somewhere? I ended up with a 50/50 mix of nice dry bales & wet ones. I checked for readyness by picking up a handful & seeing if the stems cracked when bending/twisting. The oats would only crackle & not break. The grasses are deep green & brittle & the weeds were the same as the oats. My questions are: 1.) Without the aide of a moisture tester, what's the best way to tell if my green oats, with a light amount of grasses/weeds, is dry? (I was shown the afforementioned "testing" method a long time ago in red clover & alfalfa). 3.) Do I really need a hay crusher? 3.) Will the sun leach the nutritional value out of oat stem if it dries? 4.) Should I somehow break up the wet bales to dry & then rebale 'em? 5.) Should the wet one maybe get fed out right away? 6.) Who should I sell to. (What animal is going to eat all of this nonsense?!) Thanks in advance & thank you to those of you who replied to my previous post. - Mike

Do not stack that wet hay in the barn.It could go through a heat and burn the Barn down.You should never bale any kind of grass if its not dry.Also the wet hay can mold and distress or kill the animals it is fed too.

Oats as hay takes forever to dry.
Buddy of mine figured 9 days.
Cut and crimped mine in boot stage and it took better than a week to dry down enough to bale.
If I do them again I will be getting a tedder to fluff them up a bit which should cut down the drying time.
Goats love oat hay, beefers will eat it quite readily.

(reply to post at 16:09:09 07/30/08)

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Should I send the wet ones to the compost heap?

Once its in the bale, and been there 24 hrs, its really too late to change plans. Leave it out somewhere to dry all the way out, with no one bale touching another. Then see whats left and write the loss up to experience.

As to oat hay, its the devil to cure. I only put it up (and other small grains) as wrapped and ferminted hay anymore. Takes at least a week tedded or conditioned to cure laying flat.

As to your question on moisture, there is only one sure way, test it. I understand the cost of a tester, and they dont account well for stem moisture. If you have access to a postage or digital scale and a microwave its all you need.

1. weigh a sample
2. microwave 15 sec and weigh
3. repeat step 2 until it loses no more weight.
4. take the final weight and divide the beginning weight into it. This will give you percent dry matter
5. subtract percent dry matter from 100 to get percent moisture.

I crushed mine with a 32 JD & fluffed it 2 or 3 days, Had hot dry weather last year so it dried great. The bales you have wet are probaly to far gone to do anything now.