I am sitting at the computer writing my story this week as perspiration trickles down my back, thankful for the air-conditioned air coming up from the furnace vent to my left, quickly cooling me down.
I’ve just come in from unloading hay. We had filled three wagon loads to the brim when we finished second crop a while back and had parked them in the shed to tackle later. Today my husband announced we’d “get at those loads.” I have to say, I am definitely feeling my age. This task becomes harder and harder as the years roll by.
There are many ways to make and store quality hay safely, and handling those smaller, 40-pound square bales is just one of them. Taking a drive one day we noticed a storage facility where there were several different kinds of stored feed. We know this guy happens to be a custom for-hire harvester and it amazed me how many different ways of making and storing hay he actually had at his place.
At the forefront were bunkers full of silage. This silage is harvested greener, blown in a large pile, packed down hard and covered with a huge tarp, which is then held in place by old car, truck or tractor tires. This keeps the feed secure and prevents mold. On this facility they also had stacks and stacks of large square bales (some of which we made this year on our farm) and an area full of big round bales.
Another way to make and store haylage is by filling cement silos. We’ve slowly begun to eliminate silo filling on our farm and are going with silage bags simply because filling silage bags demands less physical work. Silo maintenance played a part in our decision to ease into storing our haylage in silage bags instead. Silo maintenance includes chipping frozen silage off the inside walls in the winter, keeping up with repairing inside silo doors, silo unloader maintenance, leveling off as the silage reaches the peak of the silo during filling, and being ever vigilant of silo gasses.
Those big blue Harvestor silos scattered over the countryside are another means of haylage storage. The silos are fed out from the bottom up. The feed must be dried down more when filling a Harvestor, compared to a cement silo, which is fed out from the top down. My dad never had a Harvestor although many of our neighbors put those up years ago.
Dad put up some of our harvest as chopped, dry hay, blowing it onto the barn mow floor via connected silo pipes and a blower. This eliminated physically handling much of our dry hay crop at the time of harvest, but later it was really dusty, dirty work forking it down the chute and feeding it out to the cows in a cart.
One year this hay must have been put in not quite dry, as unbeknownst to us, it had started to heat. My sister caught it as she was forking hay down one day. She thought something smelled musty and she stuck her finger in the middle of the pile of hay and pulled it out quickly, as it was hot in the center. Knowing this meant trouble, she immediately told our dad and he called the fire department. It was a very stressful time and we were all little kids, but I remember it well. Thankfully, because of my sister’s insightfulness and quick action, our barn did not burn down.
There are many ways to store and make hay: smaller or larger square bales, bunkers, cement silos, Harvestors, dry chopped hay and round bales. Each farmer does what works best for his operation. The main thing is to harvest quality crops and to keep it all secure to fill the animals’ hungry bellies during the cold winter ahead.
(“Know your sheep by name; carefully attend to your flocks. Don’t take them for granted; possessions don’t last forever, you know. And then, when the crops are in and the harvest is stored in the barns, you can knit sweaters from lambs’ wool, and sell your goats for a profit. There will be plenty of milk and meat to last your family through the winter.” Proverbs 21:23-27, The Message Bible)
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