Thursday, July 7, 2011

First crop of hay

Last year we fertilized several of our hay fields with sugar beet lime, organic substance that apparently did well. We had two smaller hay fields and got over 100 and 140 LARGE round bales for our cattle for the winter months! Last year we had only 150 total from TWO crops of hay from the same fields and same weather conditions! Fantastic!! We also fed oat straw to the cows during the beginning of the fall as they didn't need such high protein in their diets and they were just as fat and sassy as they were in years past when we fed them corn silage (shudders at the thought). All of the second cutting of hay will be small squares for the sheep. last year i needed about 1500 small squares to get through the winter and I had a few extra bales up in the hay mow. This year I think I will need about the same, as i won't have as many BFLs to over winter this year. But I'm excited for EXTRA hay as this stuff will be higher in protein and nutrition than last years hay, which was harvested from land that my dad is letting our neighbor rent this year.

I'm quite pleased to already know that there will be enough for everyone again this year to eat!

1 comment:

Rayna said...

Woohoo! If you got awesome crops like that, maybe everyone did, and prices will be a tad lower this year! lol

A long time coming!

 It has been a long time. Too long in fact. We lost access to our farm website and ebonwald website when WEBS.COM was closed by VistaPrint. ...