Lachlanandmarcus your baler looks
exactly like our No 2 baler (which actually has been the No 1 baler this year as it did such a cracking job last year when No 1 baler broke down.)
As far as I can see,
all small-bale balers throw loose bales from time-to-time, experienced baler-men and -women seem to just love all the tinkering and fiddling this entails...
And stookers appreciate the rest from stooking while heads are scratched and things that screw are screwed...
We work on the basis of 40 sheep eat a small bale in one day if there's nothing else for them; a suckler cow without access to grass gets half a bale a day (maybe a bit more if she's got a young calf) as does a native pony if indoors for some reason.
As everyone has said, it's really very difficult for your local farmer to get your hay for you as s/he will be busy getting his/her own and at the moment there do not seem to be enough haymaking windows in the so-called summer to get our own. (Although taking half the hay as payment would certainly provide a reasonable incentive - no-one's ever offered us that or anything like it!)
You need to be very sparse with artificial fertiliser for ground on which you want to make hay - anything more than a thin sprinkle will make the grass too soft for hay. Great for silage but not up to being worked as much as hay or haylage needs to be worked. Having said which, melholly you are in the south I think?, so you will need to work the hay a lot less than us up here in the far north of England and in Scotland.
Ideally you cut the grass for hay just before the flower heads form on the grasses, this is when it is at its sweetest and most nutritious. Where we are, June hay is the best hay, really we all want to get all our hay done by the end of July if at all possible. (I know some hill farms don't have enough to cut until July most years, and anyone straight-jacketed by an environmental scheme may not be allowed to cut until mid-July.) By August the morning and evening dews and the shortening days are making it harder and harder to make good hay. We have made good hay at the very end of May and we made good hay in early September last year, but those are exceptions.
Given that you are further south, melholly, I think the grass will be well past it if you leave the field empty all year then don't cut it until autumn. I suspect you would want to be cutting in May or early June if it's been empty all winter and the spring has been ok. The other thing to think about is that an earlier cut will keep any flowering plants (including ragwort) under control as you are cutting before they have time to flower and seed, so they never get established. (The environmental schemes are aiming for the exact opposite - they don't want the grass cut until the meadow flowers have seeded.)
I'm not sure why you are wanting to keep this field empty - but remember that if you are taking grass off and not putting stock on then there's no replacement of the nutrients removed, so if this was for more than one year then you would need to manure either by spreading muck or by grazing sheep or cattle (unless you are aiming for depleting the nutrients as they do in some of the environmental schemes.) Remember there could be weed seeds in the muck depending on what the stock had been eating...
If it is just that you don't need to graze it yourself and wanted some hay, you might get on better finding someone to graze it and pay you in hay or haylage. It could be a local farmer, but try not to let them know you can't tell straw from hay yet...
(don't worry, it'll come; it's a rite of passage. We all had to learn once - but the farmer won't remember ever having not known...)
Topic: speaking of hay... (Read 22656 times)
