Hay Hay Hay! (Get ready to get bored!)

Yay! We actually got the hay shelter in a good, if temporary, state for keeping our hay dry and out of the sun. The posts are set in concrete and the cattle panel roof is all set, but the current tarp configuration is temporary.

Jay delivered my hay Sunday while I was at Spinsters Club. It was super humid during haying (more on that below), so he put up my hay in large round bales instead of small square bales, and swapped me out an equivalent of my share of small squares of prairie grass from their pasture.

Hay Primer

(By the way, this is largely what I’ve read in books or extension flyers, or been told. My firsthand expertise is limited to watching someone else hay my pasture, and the 40-odd bales I’ve fed, the 20-odd bales I’ve let get spoiled in the weather and later used for mulch/hay bale garden, and the 75 new bales sitting under my shiny new hay shelter.)

So hay. Hay is basically dry plant matter packed together for longer-term, compact storage. Think of it like dried fruit versus fresh fruit: way less perishable, way less juicy, somewhat less tasty but still good, and a little more nutritionally dense pound-for-pound because they water weight is much lower.

Hay can be legume (e.g., alfalfa or clover) or grass (e.g., brome, prairie grass, etc.–what we usually have around here). Legumes are cut multiple times in a season and certain cuttings are considered better than others. I know nothing about it, as we have grass hay, which is cut once. Legume hay is richer, with more protein and nutrition by volume. However, grass hay has the benefit of providing more roughage with fewer calories, which can be advantageous for mature animals who might be prone to getting fat.  You can think of it like granola versus shredded wheat. Yeah, granola is tastier, but I can eat way more shredded wheat without adding to my fat ass.

Hay is different from straw, which is the leftover stalks from other crops, usually wheat. Straw is more inert, less prone to rot, and makes great bedding because its thick, smooth stalks don’t get all worked into the fleece. Hay has little nutritional value but is good roughage, and the sheep will sometimes eat it. I think some farmers feed it deliberately to add more roughage volume to an otherwise rich diet. It’s also a good dry mulch (think strawberries) and the basis for straw bale construction.

In the winter, I feed the sheep all they hay they want, with a little grain as an evening treat. If you’re not sure about the nutrition of the hay, you can kind of keep an eye on the animals and supplement with grain. For instance, last month, I noticed both the ewes seemed a little bony, so I quit backing off their grain, which I was inadvertantly doing too quickly, because they lambs were eating bigger and bigger shares of the same amount, effectively backing off the ewe’s ration naturally. On the other end of the spectrum, right now, the wethers are fat, and are clearly getting too much grain, because they’re pushy and have horns. I should probably move the little trough out to the pasture and grain them scantly and separately from the moms and the babies, who aren’t piggy enough to fight them.

(They’re actually eating pasture right now, but it’s the same idea: you can give them a little more grain if they’re eating all the pasture they can and they still seem thin.)

All hay it is mowed, left to dry a bit (sometimes turned or raked at that point), and then gathered up and packed into bales with great big farm machines.  (Hay can also be mowed, loaded, and baled or stacked with draft horses or by hand, but that’s a whole other process.) The idea is to bring down the moisture to safe levels without getting it completely sun-baked. This can be really rough if it’s humid, or worse, rainy.

You can have small square bales (what hobby farmers typically want), or large square bales (you don’t see those much in the US), or large round bales (the most common in the US). Each type of bale is made with a different machine, and they’re all fun to watch

The large round bales are the ones you see dotting freshly-shorn pastures this time of year. They’re tied with either rows of twine or sometimes a plastic netting or wrap. They’re most commonly used to feed cattle or horses–big animals. But they’re also used for larger numbers of smaller animals. They’re not for the hobby farmer because they’re huge (typically 5′ high by 4′ wide) and heavy (500-1200 pounds).  You can’t just roll one around. You need special equipment to move it–a big spike thing that stabs the center of the bale and either lifts or drags it around with a truck or tractor.

Apparently if the hay isn’t getting dry quickly enough, the big bales can be a better form, because the drier hay (the stuff exposed most directly to the sun after mowing) can absorb some of the moisture from the wetter hay, so you get a good net effect. Also, the big bales, with their lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, hold up better in the weather (so they very outside might get beaten, but there’s proportionally way more good stuff in side). Their round shape means rain is more apt to run off it than to soak in as it would with square bales.

The small square bales are what you think of on a hay ride. They’re 3-4′ long, 18-24″ wide and 12-18″ tall. At 40-60 pounds, they’re also the easiest to handle. They’re tied in two places, longways, with either twine or baling wire.

You can carry the bales by grabbing both pieces of twine like the handles on a shopping bag, but an easier way is to use a hay hook, which you can plunge into the bale behind the twine for support, then use to drag the bale around. It’s especially handy pulling down a bale at the top of the stack. I didn’t have one last winter, and I’m super excited about it. With its red finish, it’s easy to spot and cheery, which is a nice counterpoint to the inherent menace of a big metal hook. Those big, colorful machines in the distance are used in haying.

When you cut the twine on a small square bale, it kind of heaves a sigh and expands a little but basically stays together if you don’t try to move it. From the side, you can see the “slices” of the bale, called flakes, which fall away from the bale like slices of bread but stay reasonably well compacted together, so it’s easy to grab a couple of flakes and pop them in a feeder.

This hay doesn’t look as nice and fresh to me as they hay I got from my own pasture last year, but what do I know about hay? And you can’t really tell until you crack one open, which I won’t be doing until fall.

Below you can see a couple of flakes (the one on the left has been mangled a bit by a dog sleeping on it; the one on the right is pretty intact). From all the leafy green bits, I think it’s alfalfa hay.

Flakes by thejesse on flickr.

Hay needs to be covered and stored away from the rain, wind snow, etc. It also suffers nutritional loss from exposure to sunlight, so even when the weather is fair, it’s good to put it out of the sun. Wet hay can get moldy or can rot, which can lead to even more problems. You don’t want to feed moldy hay (it can be toxic), but you don’t need to be super panicky, because you can usually tell if it’s bad by looking at it; and besides, most animals won’t eat it unless they’re starving. They’ll just spill it everywhere and root around for the better stuff. Some animals will simply refuse hay if it’s not just perfect (I’m not talking moldy here, but just not cut at the prime moment they prefer); I’ve heard goats and alpacas are both way pickier than sheep. My sheep will even nibble the ancient mulch hay I bought for bedding, though I’m guessing it has zero nutritional value. It’s like eating celery. Dry, withered celery.

(BTW, If you do let your hay get spoiled, all is not lost (well, from the animals’ perspective, yeah it is). You can still use it as an excellent mulch–the flakes make it easy to lay out over a garden like tiles–or you can plant directly into rotting bales. From my limited experience hay bale garden isn’t as fruitful as a conventional garden, but it’s way convenient for several reasons. They have many of the benefits of raised beds without the expense: all the plants start a couple feet off the ground, so care and harvesting are easy on your back; rabbits can’t get to your plants; you’ll get the odd weeds, but they’re much easier to pull out than in a real garden; you can plant densely but sill have plenty of room to walk around them; you can start them anywhere–mine are on the impenetrable gravel of the school’s courtyard, which can normally only accommodate weeds; they hold water fairly well, but also drain nicely; and when they rot away entirely, you can just push them into a pile and compost them!)

So here’s my perfectly serviceable if half-finished hay shelter! It’s got two posts in concrete, with rails between, and curved cattle panels forming the framework of the roof. Right now it’s a quilt of tarps, but I ordered a great big, heavy-duty recycled billboard tarp that will replace the curved top and straight wall. Then the current roof tarp will be moved to form the curved wall over near Agnes, silver side out. I’ll want to come up with some kind of door opening on that side. When it’s done, I’ll be able to go inside and shove a bale of hay onto that ramp above Agnes, then walk into the barn and open the little door over the ramp and grab my hay. Much better than my awful “system” last year of dragging a bale out from under the tarp, which was weighted down with a hodgepodge of bungies, boards, and bricks, dragging it over for middleman storage in the empty chicken coop. Besides, next winter, there will be actual chickens in the coop!

On the curved ends, the tarps are attached to the cattle panels 4-6″ in from the edge so that the roof overhands the sides, which should hopefully keep everything nice and dry.

The roof is supported with 2 ranch panels (trimmed to about 14′ long) with leftover woven wire fencing filling the gap.  The hay is stacked 4-6 bales tall on seven old pallets, which are resting on chunks of concrete. I imagine there will be a whole world of rabbits and mice under there (and hopefully a successful barn cat), but at least the hay will be dry and off the ground. The shelter is big enough for 3 x 3 pallets, so There’s also a 2-pallet-deep empty space leftover where I intend to move the dead deep freeze to store grain, as well as some implements like the manure fork, random buckets, etc.

Hay Math

If you have pasture, you can pay someone to hay it, either in a share of the hay or cash. Last year, I paid in hay and still had plenty from my share to feed all winter (or, more accurately: I would have had enough if I hadn’t let a bunch of it get rained on or later destroyed by a shredded tarp–the winds out here will turn a sturdy tarp with a little slack into threadbare chiffon in no time).

This year, there was an extra little chunk of pasture Jay couldn’t hay because of branches jumping into his mower, so I ended up with a handful fewer bales coming my way than last year. With last year’s flock, it would have been no trouble, but with my flock 75% larger (and probably doubled by weight once the lambs are grown), I had to buy some to be on the safe side. I got a total of 75 bales.

Hm. I just redid the math and realized I probably should have gone a little higher.

Here’s how I figured it. I reckoned about half a bale a day for 5 months. Last winter they were eating 2-3 flakes a day, or a bale every 4-5 days, until the spring when Agnes & Fudgy got closer to lambing (when it almost doubled for about a month). So I doubled that amount, because Uncle Honeybunch and Mr. Shivers are small, so I figured it’s more like going from 3 sheep to 6 than 4 to 7. So: 0.5 x 30 (days in a month) x 5 (November – March) = 75 bales.

To check my math, I sussed out my per-animal average for the winter. Last year, I probably threw out a good third of the 58 bales I got. So 40 bales + 8 more I bought = 48 bales.

48 bales/4 sheep (I’m counting them as whole sheep here, since you’re averaging in two piggy pregnant/nursing ewes for part of that time) = 12 bales each. 12 x 6 = 72 (I’m back to counting the Shetlands as half-sheep, since there will be no pregnant/lactating animals to up the averages, and you need 2 Shetlands to = 1 Romney).

But to be really safe, it’s smarter to figure on 6 months’ worth of hay, which would be 90 bales by method #1 and 87 by method #2. Our first frost date is 10/1, but the grass doesn’t freeze then. Typically, there’s still grass until the end of October. If that’s the case this year, I can graze them until the beginning of November and… Hm. April isn’t reliably grassy yet, either. Usually April gets all nice and green and then screws you with a big freeze. The freeze usually isn’t enough to wipe out grass, though; more of a tender growth killer. Well, anyway. We’ll see.

Spontaneous Combustion!

Apart from not wanting the expense of waste of moldy or rotten hay, it’s especially important for hay to be dry enough when it’s baled for general safety. Too-moist hay invites rot/composting, which creates heat (like the center of a compost pile); if enough heat builds up, voilà: spontaneous combustion!

In non-hay-related news, Spinsters Club was on Sunday at Jen’s & fun as usual!

Here was my carpool on the way home: