The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Land Management => Topic started by: melholly on August 24, 2011, 05:12:38 pm
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...the previous thread on hay meadows set me thinking.
Next year we aim to leave one field uncut and ungrazed on (fallow is it called?) until the autumn with a view to then getting it cut and baled. As a COMPLETE newcomer to smallholding etc I have a zillion Q's as to the practicalities of this:
1. Am I making hay or straw (and how DO u tell the difference? lol)
2. The field in Q is circa 1.5 acres - is it worth it?
3. What the blinking heck do I ask for and where - should I contact my local farms to ask for someone to 'bale my field?!' I can also see differences in round bales, large and small etc...
4. The field is beautiful pasture - lush grass, little weed, no ragwort etc - do I need to specifically treat it during the year?
5. How much is all of this and if I choose to sell any bales where best to sell them to - I'm guessing with the size of the field it's best to retain it for personal use...
Thanks ever so much guys if you've even read this far! Any answers always appreciated
Mx
http://selfridgestoscats.blogspot.com (http://selfridgestoscats.blogspot.com)
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...the previous thread on hay meadows set me thinking.
Next year we aim to leave one field uncut and ungrazed on (fallow is it called?) until the autumn with a view to then getting it cut and baled. As a COMPLETE newcomer to smallholding etc I have a zillion Q's as to the practicalities of this:
1. Am I making hay or straw (and how DO u tell the difference? lol)
2. The field in Q is circa 1.5 acres - is it worth it?
3. What the blinking heck do I ask for and where - should I contact my local farms to ask for someone to 'bale my field?!' I can also see differences in round bales, large and small etc...
4. The field is beautiful pasture - lush grass, little weed, no ragwort etc - do I need to specifically treat it during the year?
5. How much is all of this and if I choose to sell any bales where best to sell them to - I'm guessing with the size of the field it's best to retain it for personal use...
Thanks ever so much guys if you've even read this far! Any answers always appreciated
Mx
http://selfridgestoscats.blogspot.com (http://selfridgestoscats.blogspot.com)
Also as a newbie I'll be looking forward to the answers to this one!
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You would be making hay - straw is from a cereal crop such as wheat or barley. But to make hay you don't just cut and bale - the skill is in the actual making part - spreading it and turning it in the sun and wind for several days, having carefully chosen your window of good weather. Just when that window is and when you will make the best hay varies around the country. During the window every one else who makes hay will be doing so, whether they are small farmers or contractors so if you can't do the work yourself it is always risky relying on someone else. It is usual to pay whoever does the haymaking in the form of half the crop, so from 1.5 acres you would be left with less than 75 small bales
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fallow= ploughed and cultivated and left without a crop for that year
if you are getting someone else to do all the work i doubt if it will be worth your while
special treatment= you have to feed the crop if you keep taking out without putting something back the yield diminishes
how much is all this = if i could tell you this i would know the numbers to the euro lottery
and second every thing fleecewife has said :farmer:
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Like you, we could set aside some grass for hay but for all the reasons robert and fleecewife cite, we're stocking to summer capacity and buying hay in.
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You might get more bales - we did an acre this week (quite late so lower yield and in NE Scotland on exposed unfertilised field) and got 100+ small bales.
For horse hay (the main market for small bales) they will prefer it unfertilised, it's too rich for horses with lots of fertiliser added. Great that theres no ragwort.
The difficulty will be finding someone to do it and do it when the weather is as perfect as it has to be to make good hay, and more especially someone to come and do small bales if thats what you want/need. Most farms of any size do the giant round or giant cube (hesston) bales these days, or just make silage or haylage which are a bit more forgiving of the odd rain shower.
If you could handle using large round bales, a next door farmer might agree to do it but it may not be cost efficient. If you do it then you could put a small ad in the paper or at the local agric store or even enter it into the local agric auctioneers fodder sale (often weekly at this time of year, many loads are for uplift from where they are made so you wouldnt have to deliver to the buyer)
Or you could try a scythe and do it by hand!
We acquired small baling equipment second hand gradually (hay mower, wuffler (to spread out the mown hay to dry and then, on a different position, to row it up ready for baling) and small square baler (ancient new holland one). Prob cost in total £1500 but these are ancient things we are talking about, but they do work!
(http://i342.photobucket.com/albums/o405/lachlanandmarcus/P1020363.jpg)
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I should also have said that an average sheep in an average year will eat 5 averagely small bales of average hay over the course of an average winter - so you could feed a dozen sheep on that...yes, on average ;D All the averages are because sheep vary very much in size and how much they eat, each year is different for when you need to start feeding hay and for how many months, bales are not all identical in weight so you will need more light bales than heavy ones (and of course heavy bales might just be wet and therefore rotten), and winters vary in severity both up and down the country and from year to year, so you can only ever average out how many animals you will feed. Also making hay is always chancy because we sometimes simply don't get the right weather to make it and in those years you will end up having to pay someone to wrap it for you.
I have absolutely no idea how much other species eat.
On the other hand, if you can make your own hay it is worth it. After the first couple of years of getting neighbours to make our hay for us, and losing the whole lot one year because of course they were making their own before they did ours (nothing wrong with that as they have their own living to make) so it all rotted, we bought our own equipment - very second hand - and now we make our own every year. Even this year with me stuck in hospital down south and only the tightest of haymaking windows my OH made enough top quality hay for our flock and some extra to sell. Although I grew up on a farm, it was in an area where no-one made hay, so I didn't have much of a clue what to do, but now after many years I think we are both fairly good at it, so you will learn :)
Lachlanandmarcus posted while I was still typing :) - the 75 bales from 1.5 acres was allowing for 150, but shared half and half with the person doing the work.
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these are ancient things we are talking about, but they do work!
Your baler looks modern compared to mine!
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just check out that second tractor ;) :farmer:
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Fleecewife you are too kind, I should have read your post properly! Yep I reckon we got about 125 bales so sharing 50:50 would have meant 62 each and argue over the last one! :-)) Thankfully we get to snaffle it all and also did a second slightly smaller field so the (small) barn is nice and full
The NH baler has only been described as ancient since this last week as an insult as it drove OH a bit mad doing 3 nice tight bales and then a fleet of baggy ones that he failed to notice but me as loader found out when I tried to pick them up and got turned into a human hay stook.....still the sheep didnt mind the fallout, they piled in!
Landy has done sterling work as always on the farm, sometimes I wonder near the end of the winter whether there is more hay in the barn or in the back of the Landrover.....:-))
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We got into sheep because we needed to manage our pasture and we were let-down by contractors two years in a row on hay-making, losing the lot and still having a lot of work to do. Round here there's very little secondhand smallholder kit cos the farms are basically huge arable enterprises. New hay kit is impossibly expensive.
So we buy in haylage, well in advance. We find Haylage to be much more economic to use.
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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... :farmer: :dunce: :D (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...)
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Wow, so many great responses thank you all! This is seriously way too much for me and my basic levels of smallholding! Oh my naivity! Our 5 acres is fenced off into 3 main paddocks. The paddock where our open barn/lambing sheds are we have left after a late spring mow thinking that in winter (snow aside!) the 7 sheep we have (5 lambs) would appreciate being able to shelter in the barn and have nice grass.... I am in the SE so though snow seems to arrive it hasn't (yet) been as bad as much of the North of the country...
The sheep have been flitting between the remaining 2 paddocks all summer (lawnmowing) so I thought next year we could 'easily' keep one free, turn it to hay/straw. God I need a course on this as I inherited a barn and an old royal mail trailer stuffed with 'hay/straw.' I assume in the barn it's straw - well that's been my ducks bedding all year, but the stuff in the van looks a bit different but that might be because it's in small bales, whereas the barn are the massive roundals (also is there a science to getting into those tight wrapped roundals or is it the brute strength of my pitch fork?!) Anyway, clearly it's not all that 'easy.' LOL!! I am so green at times!!
Now am I missing something obvious here - sheep + hay. Am I right in thinking I just need to give my sheep some hay when it snows/ frost for obvious ground reasons? Can I give haylage? God I've got visions now of my sheep starving or me feeding them the wrong stuff!! Hmmm.... I'd better start thinking winter through hadn't I before considering next autumn?!!! :-)
Mx
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Right deep breath and off to the barn. Is this stuff thick and yellow or is it around the same thickness as long grass? Is it fairly uniform or do there appear to be several different types of plants in it? Is there any clover for instance? If its thicker than grass and yellow its straw. Green or light brown and preferably sweet smelling with different types of plants in it and same thickness as the stems on long grass and its hay.
Yes you can feed the sheep haylage although it can be an expensive way of doing it. What are you giving them now or are they just on grass at the moment? If you are going to have lambs then you might want to start planning how you are going to feed them before you put a ram in with them.
With three paddocks I would be tempted to graze them all. You won't need a huge amount of hay for just a few sheep but you have heavy sheep and they will need room in the winter if you want to avoid turning the paddocks into mud patches.
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Wow, so many great responses thank you all! This is seriously way too much for me and my basic levels of smallholding! Oh my naivity!
;D ;D ;D It's not too much for you - just a lot in one day! Been there, done it. In fact, still there, still doing it.
Lots of folk on here who will help you with good advice. :sheep: :sheep: :sheep:
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On previous posts about baling, i spoke to my friend (scottish)who has a metal fabrication factory in Hong Kong. I waxed lyrically about mini round hay balers and he said he would get me a price to manufacture- exactlly the same as the 850 * model. He is quoting around £3k which is around £1.5k saving and towed with a mini tractor @18hp +.
It just proves that anything can be copied and made abroad?? Any suggestions?
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Ok... well I've bitten the bullet and after sending my lab into 'investigate the living' in the back of the mail van first I've come out deciding that despite the difference in bales it's the same stuff as in the barn. Quick thick, coarse, no real smell, pale with bits of flower head in it. Guessing that's all straw then!
Thank you all, feel like a right idiot not knowing the difference. I love learning about my small bit of land but keep kicking myself at basic things!! All sheep are just on grass, they get a nibble of sheep nut every 3 days just to keep them easy to catch etc. I was planning in winter to keep it this way and perhaps put a low haynet in the barn for them for when snow is on the ground (will sheep eat through frost?) As for the lambs which hopefully will be planned for early spring I was just planning to let nature take it's role (unless there is cause for intervention) and allow the lambs to feed off mum until weaning...?
Is this ok do you think? Trying to keep everything as natural as poss but obviously don't want to do harm to my breeding females either!
Mx
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When lambing is a few weeks away you will need to feed them a great deal more and maybe have a mineral lick. Producing a lamb takes a lot of nutrition, and they won't get that from the grass. Read the manufacturers recommendations on the sacks of feed (and you should record the supplier details, batch numbers and dates for traceability stuff)
We were all new at this once. OH is an obsessive reader of technical books on sheep, horses, bees etc to keep up with her various degrees but there is no substitute for doing it, cocking it up and doing it again properly. And asking dumb questions because for every answer to a dumb question there's a bunch of people saying "I never knew that". The animals don't read the books either. As the CAA advises learn from the mistakes of others because you won't live long enough to make all of them for yourself.
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You might get more bales - we did an acre this week (quite late so lower yield and in NE Scotland on exposed unfertilised field) and got 100+ small bales.
For horse hay (the main market for small bales) they will prefer it unfertilised, it's too rich for horses with lots of fertiliser added. Great that theres no ragwort.
The difficulty will be finding someone to do it and do it when the weather is as perfect as it has to be to make good hay, and more especially someone to come and do small bales if thats what you want/need. Most farms of any size do the giant round or giant cube (hesston) bales these days, or just make silage or haylage which are a bit more forgiving of the odd rain shower.
If you could handle using large round bales, a next door farmer might agree to do it but it may not be cost efficient. If you do it then you could put a small ad in the paper or at the local agric store or even enter it into the local agric auctioneers fodder sale (often weekly at this time of year, many loads are for uplift from where they are made so you wouldnt have to deliver to the buyer)
Or you could try a scythe and do it by hand!
We acquired small baling equipment second hand gradually (hay mower, wuffler (to spread out the mown hay to dry and then, on a different position, to row it up ready for baling) and small square baler (ancient new holland one). Prob cost in total £1500 but these are ancient things we are talking about, but they do work!
(http://i342.photobucket.com/albums/o405/lachlanandmarcus/P1020363.jpg)
We have just bought a NH376 similiar to yours and I was just wondering what size tractor you use to power it?
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Its a dear old John Deere 2030, made in 1976!!
Here she is!
(http://i342.photobucket.com/albums/o405/lachlanandmarcus/008.jpg)
75 hp of pure power! Just have to hope it isnt raining! Its only 2wd but our fields arent too steep.
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Can I just say how lovely this forum is? It is so refreshing that we can ask fairly basic questions and not get the "surely you know that" sort of responses. What a nice bunch of people :wave: