Posted by paul on March 07, 2010 at 09:22:19 from (66.44.132.155):
In Reply to: Alfalfa?? posted by dave2 on March 07, 2010 at 08:25:24:
If you already have a working relationship with him, should work out.
Alfalfa likes a lot of P & K over the 4 year period, or it gets thing. It doesn't need any N. So you might not get the best deal from just manure application.... It can cost $75-150 an acre to get the fertility set up right for an alfalfa field. Best to get most of the P & K on before you plant, it's harder to get the K worked into the ground once it's planted.
Seed on an acre could be 20 lbs, which could be close to $100.
Machinery costs to plant an acre - I'd have more invested in driving there than actually doing the work, so as a farmer I'd just smile & not worry about that - no cost.
If you cut your own, should work out. You might want to let him take 1st & 2nd cut so he can make his silage when it works for him; then you cut the 3rd & 4th - if there is any - so you can 'play' with the stuff and not mess up his cutting schedule.
If you cut the acre a week after he does his other fields, that acre will be out of step the rest of the year & not work out well for him. So perhaps it would work out best with a schedule like this.
My worry as a farmer is that the schedule gets messed up & I end up getting no hay from it, or have to travel around extra just for an acre - road travel can easily cost more than the value of the hay.
So if the seed & fertilizer costs were covered, I'd do it for you & then not worry about if I got hay or not from it. The machinery part just be nice to help out a neighbor, let him play with his land. :)
Just trying to give you a little perspective of what I'd be thinking about.
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Today's Featured Article - A Lifetime of David Brown Tractors - by Samuel Kennedy. I was born in 1950 and reared on my family�s 100 acre farm. It was a fairly typical Northern Ireland farm where the main enterprise was dairying but some pigs, poultry and sheep were also kept. Potatoes were grown for sale and oats were grown to be used for cattle and horse feeding. Up to about 1958 the dairy cows were fed hay with some turnips and after that grass silage was the main winter feed. That same year was the last in which flax was grown on the farm. Flax provided the fibre which w
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