Yeah you read that right, no I didn’t misspell it.
We go our share of the second cutting of the hay today from our field. Now we’ve lived here 7 years and it’s been farmed all this time by Mr. Baker the farmer down the road the whole time. Though he’s rented the land because we didn’t have a use for it, or rather, we didn’t have a means to farm it ourselves or the tools to keep it mowed. So we let him farm it and it’s paid the taxes, etc, etc.
Now that we have Cisco, and potentially a horse to be named later. We changed the rules this year. We’re share cropping the field, meaning we get half the hay in lieu of pay. This is good and this is bad. We also share the risk, if it’s a bad year for hay we get half of that bad hay. If it’s a good year, we get half the good hay too.
Our field was planted a couple years ago and is a very rich crop of alfalfa orchard mix. What ever that means. All I know is it has lots of alfalfa in it.
Well the 2nd cutting is the best cutting for horses. It’s the most tender and delicious.
We figure our current loft can hold somewhere between 300 and 400 square bales.
Today they came and baled so we got to stock our loft. Yippee! What fun.
Lucky for us Mr. Baker loaned us a conveyer to get the bales up to the loft so we didn’t have to climb ladders.
Even so, lifting 250 bales onto a conveyor, off of a conveyer and stacking them is no picnic. I had no idea how un-fun this was.
We built our barn big enough for a hay truck to drive in, but the openings weren’t quite big enough for the hay-picker-upper-stacker thing to drop the hay off inside. So that got dropped off at the door. So it was lug the bales to the conveyer, pick them up set them on. Then someone up top grabbed them and stacked them. All the while bits of hay are flying everywhere. Joy.
It was a good work out though. At least I can say that. 🙂
Next year I think I’ll find some immigrants though.