The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Land Management => Topic started by: A Guest on June 29, 2015, 12:52:58 pm
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I have around 10-12 acres. I have a very tractor with Fahr mower, bob, and Jones baler. All very old and baler may be seized, I am about to find out, somewhat nervous!!
The grass is very long. We have a few sheep but only grazing 1 of the 4 fields. Last year we let a farmer take silage from it, just to get it cut, and the year before we let his cows graze it. We are considering offering him to use the grass again but hate giving it away so it's time to try making hay for the first time. I have a few questions, forgive the greenness of my questions (no pun intended!) and hope some nice experienced folk on here could maybe offer some answers or suggestions to this green newbie! .......
1. I know how to make hay, the basics at least. But how do you know when is the best time to cut? The grass seems pretty long now to me, seed heads all over, a nice red colour on the top especially in the evening sun. My wife however thinks its too early and says to wait until August. But with this heatwave we are having from today/tomorrow, I think I should get cutting. Any hints for solving this particular domestic? :D
2. Thistles/Weeds - we had a few thistles last year. We do not want to use chemical sprays, so we dug a few up last year and burned them. We have a lot more this year. I assume we are right to avoid those in the hay for obvious reasons, but does anyone have tips for getting rid of these?
3. We actually don't need hay very badly. Our fields are all nicely fenced now (finally) so this winter won't see the sheep confined to one small area with electric fencing, they can graze all 4 fields in rotation (if that's wise?). So the main purpose of cutting the fields is because we don't want weeds to get any worse. Am I right in thinking you can't leave it long and uncut year after year? I assume not as I think this allows weeds to strengthen and seed, but if our baler doesn't work, I wondered about just cutting and letting it lie, or cutting and turning so we can collect by hand with forks and trailers, then putting the cuttings somewhere to rot down.
What about a little idea I just had of cutting it over and over, only maybe 1-2 inches at a time, as a kind of mulch method, so short bits rot down?
Basically, since we dont "need" the hay, I am looking for the best possible way to manage the land, keep the nutrients in there as best as possible, reduce weed and thistle growth, and generally just tidy up as easily and cheaply as possible.
Any and all thoughts very welcome, thanks!
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The ideal time to cut hay is when you can guarantee up to 5 days of dry weather , the best bit of the grass is leaf so less stems / flower heads produces the most nutritious hay . Thistles are a constant problem , if you really don't want to spot treat with say glyphosate then hand cutting with a sickle just before flowering can weaken . The winter grazing of all 4 fields in rotation is a sensible approach , you can let the grass grow a bit longer in the autumn to utilise over the winter period ( deferred grazing ) . IF you leave grass uncut year after year it will die and form tussocks and the good grasses will get crowded out and rubbish will take over . CUTTING and let lie will kill the grass underneath if in rows mulching and spreading would work ok . Don't know how you would do it but the small cuts and rotting down would work . YOU should be able to find a farmer who would pay so much per bale to make silage or a price per head per week to graze cattle ( advertise in your local farm shop or vets or free ads ?? Hope some of this helps sorry I didn't notice the post earlier
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Thanks very much. When I said cut and let lie i meant with the hay mower on tractor.
I have a flail topper mower for towing behind quad. I did wonder if that would semi mulch and just keep cutting with that for a while to get weeds to die back. I definitely can't bring myself to use roundup type weed killers, even more so after recent news in France but I wouldn't have used it before then either. I heard vinegar can be a good alternative. I dont know when thistles flower, obviously too late now though so I guess i will have to go at it next year early on. a lot of work to come methinks!
thanks again
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We haven't cut our hay yet, but we're in Scotland, and will do so the minute the forecast tells us we have our five day window of haymaking weather. In a bad year, it can be August before we make it, but the quality isn't so good. Earlier than July and there's not much bulk. But, being down in the SW I would think you are already a bit late. Sorry Mrs A Guest ;D
For your baler, have a look at it now, grease everything and let it stand for a day or so before seeing if it works. There's no point going into haymaking not knowing if your machinery works. If you can't service it yourself, then get an agricultural mechanic to take a look. it's always a good idea never to put your machinery away after use without going over it and greasing it for the winter, so it should be raring to go when you suddenly need it.
After this year, if you really don't want the hay or don't have enough livestock to graze efficiently, you could use the topper every time the grass gets a few inches tall, maybe once a week. This will return the cut grass to the system, so you won't be removing soil food. Any longer than that and clumps of mashed grass will cause the grass underneath to go brown. However, 10-12 acres is a lot to top every week. Renting it for grazing seems a better option. I hate seeing that sort of waste.
Cutting with the hay mower then leaving it to lie is indeed likely to kill off the best grass underneath, and allow coarse grass and twitch to come through. Tidying it up by hand, for 10-12 acres is just not practical, unless you have an entire platoon to help. Even an acres worth of hay makes a huge pile for rotting down.
If your thistles are creeping thistle, then regular topping or hard grazing will keep them at bay. If they are spear thistles then you need to dig them out by hand (see the 'thistles' thread)
If you make hay and find thistles in there, then pick it over each time you turn the crop, and pick out the drying thistles then burn them. We once took hay from a neighbour's field with a thistle problem. When we came to use the hay we found that the thistle flowers had matured after cutting and blew around the field in the winter wind - the following year we had a real thistle problem which has taken several years to sort out.
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Any fool can make good hay - as long as they can make the sun shine! :sunshine:
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Fleecwife - thanks very very much for that informative post. Yes we hate waste too. Since we moved in, we have let the neighbouring farmer graze the fields with his cows. It seemed to do a good job of controlling things nicely, but then someone told us it will take most of the goodness out of the ground so we thought we would let it grow this year. I can cut and bale it (if baler works, if not it will be fixed and wet baled). The bales can be used around here for other things than animal feed, plenty of kids, bows and arrows, dens etc! Just to get it off the grass I mean, not because I want to cut good grass and let the kids use it as a toy!
We have a few sheep (including some North Ronaldsays by the way) and they only needed 10-15 bales through last winter but with the grazing here they probably wouldn't need any, so the hay taking is more an experiment than a need. Once I get everything cut and cleared, and machinery checked, working and serviced/greased up nicely, we will be able to get on top of everything more.
I have a flail mower coming for the quad (petrol powered) which will hopefully take care of the weeds around the edges of fields and allow me to quickly keep those down. Your idea of topping fields regularly is a good one, and I do actually think we could manage that. a quarter of the land is the sheeps main grazing field so it would only be the others which need topping, and I have others who can drive the quad so I think doing it once a week would be manageable.
Main issue is the damn thistles. I don't know how to find the thistles thread you mentioned. Perhaps you could drop me a link to that if you have one please?
I dont know if ours are creeping thistle or not. I will try to take a few snaps later. The most worrying thing is that the field where the sheep are has a very thin but wide area with tiny 1 inch tall thistles matting under the grass. Maybe that is what you referred to as creeping thistle? Its a bit scary to see it. covering such an area. And I reallllllly do NOT want Orf here if we can avoid it. We bought a few lambs from a farmer a year ago and they had Orf, took em straight back and disinfected everything they had touched, which was only a stable overnight, phew! We also have huge tall thistles popping up in other fields, perhaps those are spears?
thanks again, very much indeed.
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Hay made from that kind of mixed grass is perfect for primitive sheep. Even better if it has a variety of wild herbs in it (weeds to some). If you can make that into good hay and small bale it, you could sell it off the field for £3 per small bale to local smallholders, who find it difficult to source appropriate size, handleable bales. At about 90-100 bales an acre, you would have an extra income source, which is never to be sneezed at.
Whilst grazing will remove the fertility from the soil, just as taking off any crop will do too, at least with grazing the animals add that fertility right back into the soil in their droppings. Far far better than spreading artificial fertilisers which simply create lush, early growth, and leave your animals scouring.
What you do need to be sure of when renting your ground out for grazing, is that the animals are wormed immediately before coming onto your land, and that they do not carry wormer-resistant worms - which you absolutely don't want on your land.
Umm - I'll see if I can give you the link to the Thistles thread, or someone else might be kind enough to do that (I'm not very techy). This might be it
http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=62378.0;topicseen (http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=62378.0;topicseen)
Yay it worked :bow:
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You can still use that for fodder; there are years we can't get ours till it's like that, and it's still good fodder. Just it'll be better fodder if you can get it earlier. The government environmental schemes are designed to prevent you cutting your grass until all the wildflowers have seeded, and people still make hay and feed that ;) You need less when it's got earlier, and may need to supplement some livestock if it's poor - but on the plus side, poor hay is necessary for native ponies, for instance, so you might find your pony-owning neighbours queuing up to buy that off you! (When I say 'poor' I am meaning 'of poor nutritional value'.)
someone told us it will take most of the goodness out of the ground so we thought we would let it grow this year.
One of the most difficult things when you are starting out is knowing which "someone"s to listen to ;)
Grazing grass with animals is putting quite a lot of the nutrients back into the ground as the animals poop it out again, fertilising as they graze. We don't fertilise our pasture fields, only the hay meadows, as taking a hay crop off removes nutrients. By spreading the farmyard muck back onto the hay fields we replace the nutrients we removed ;) .
x-posted with Fleecewife - well done on doing the link, FW! :thumbsup:
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"that kind of mixed grass" - how do you know its mixed?! What grasses are in it that you can see? I am fascinated!! Wish I knew more!
"primitive sheep" - we only have a handful of ronnies mainly for pets for children. Our small but growing flock for meat is Wiltshire Horned. Lovely sheep too. Really dont want them getting orf!
Worming before grazing - OH DEAR! Too late for that one now, but thanks very much, will certainly bear in mind for future. We had our first lamb slaughtered recently and the vet said it had tapeworm in liver so liver couldn't be eaten. No big deal we thought, but maybe it is? He did say its most likely dogs causing it and we have dogs. Now I am a bit worried about the cattle. Neighbour just has 20 or so cows which he rears for meat, but he sprays and fertilises like all the commercial farmers do round here, so now I am a bit worried as I wouldn't be surprised if his cows had worm resistant worms, which I had never heard of until now admittedly!
I actually had that idea for taking hay for an income, a few years ago when I bought the tractor. Got a great deal on an old tractor with Jones baler, turner and Fahr mower. All working when i bought (decent chap, didn't show me but i trust him 100%). Life took over and with house renovations and stuff needed, we just let the farmer graze the fields to keep them managed. Now I would love to take hay. Trouble is, I dont have a clue what a weed is, what a herb is etc. I know dockweed and the usual thistles, brambles etc, and i know what Clover is and that its good (we have a fair bit in the fields). But how to know what is a weed and what isn't, whether to pull it, cut it, burn it, or let animals graze it, its all a bit of a mystery to me. Need to find a good book about it I think.
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Looks like a typical old grass hay meadow to me can't see any thistles or docks and not thick and rotting at the base so easy to cut and dry. Cows and sheep have different worms so don't worry , you can graze cows with sheep to reduce worms in each species .
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Thanks, this is by far the best field. is it cow parsley at the edge?I play to flail mow that down.
Cows and sheep - how interesting, thanks!
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The umbelifer looks like hogweed, but there could be cow parsley in there. Both fine.
The pink stuff at the back looks from the pic like foxglove, which you don't want as it's a poison - very pretty though. Foxglove is the plant from which Digoxin, a heart medication, which slows the heart right down and can stop it, in humans is derived. Sheep tend not to eat it, but I wouldn't trust that and would dig it out, leaves as well as flowers. Sometimes when toxic plants are dried as hay they either become more toxic, or more palateable to the animal so it will eat it in hay, when they wouldn't touch it fresh.
Stand back and look at what's growing in your field. You will see that the grass has a variety of seed heads, different shapes and colours, and heights. That means the grasses are of mixed types - there are a large number of grasses, and it doesn't really matter what they're called, just which are nutritious and which are not. When pasture is part of a rotation, where different crops are grown in each field in a set order, with soil nutrition in mind, the seed is carefully chosen for variety. I only keep primitive sheep, so I don't want the commercial type of grass, as it's too rich for my sheep. Our pasture has become 'permanent pasture', where it's not part of a crop rotation, and is not reseeded every few years, so different species of grasses, wild flowers and weeds grow.
For weeds, the persistent ones are ragwort (toxic, get it out, root and all and burn it), thistles, burrs, sticky willie (cleavers), and nettles if you don't want them, but some sheep eat them, and certain butterflies need them for their survival. You also don't want brambles, foxglove as mentioned, rushes, although they're not toxic, just a pest. there will be more depending on where you live, and certain garden plants hanging over the fence will be highly toxic too.
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Tapeworm in liver is dog worms, the *ONLY* way to prevent this is to ensure that all dogs who poop where your sheep graze are wormed for roundworm *AND* tapeworm every *THREE* months.
Many vets offer roundworm-only worming for dogs unless the owner has seen tapeworm segments. I wish they didn't... ::)
Most adult cattle don't get wormed as they build up immunity. Youngstock normally get a worm bolus for their first grazing season after they've been weaned. The best tactic is to (a) only allow grazing by animals from a High Health Status flock or herd - with cattle you also want to be sure you are not getting Johnes disease onto your land, so unless the herd never has Johnes, avoid them, and (b) graze sheep then cattle in a rotation - each species eats and nullifies each other's worms.
The weeds at the side of your field are one of the cow parsley types. They're harmless unless they are enormous and/or got purple-blotched stems. I found a good video here (http://www.eatweeds.co.uk/is-it-hemlock-or-cow-parsley) about telling hemlock from cow parsley - the id bit starts at 8 mins in.
I say 'harmless', but one of the plants that's very similar is called fool's parsley - and you don't want to eat it. I found a page here (http://www.dalswildlifesite.com/thefoolsparsley.htm) about that.
I should add that I found both those links googling - so the information, although it looks and sounds pukka, may or may not be correct. ;)
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whats umbelifer when its at home?!
when you say "both fine" what do you mean? cut it and bale with hay? cut it but not in hay?
No i dont think its foxglove but will check. we have pink wildflowers here (beautiful). will get a pic when i go that way again, thanks
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thanks Sally, very useful info there. will read those links, with a pinch of salt as you sensibly mention!
Worming - yes, we dont worm our dogs at all (unless they get an infestation or if their health appears to be affected). We do however keep them out of the sheep grazing fields now, since we recently had the fields fenced. Slowly we will get there. Can't wait to get the flail ATV mower. One of our fields we actually fenced off the bottom half as its like a nature reserve and we sort of liked it that way. Full of rush and thistle now, but also masses of brambles and berry's, the birds and bees love it, so we sort of donated that area to nature as its too boggy to get a tractor on most of the year anyway. In our naivety we sort of ignored that area and of course it's a thistle seeding factory now, so we will have to get in there and deal with it by hand. Thanks again
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If the pink isn't foxglove it's probably rosebay willowherb, or possibly broad-leaved willowherb depending on where you are. Rosebay willowherb was discussed recently, it's good fodder, apparently. Here's one thread about it (http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=21117.msg200616#msg200616).
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Worming - yes, we dont worm our dogs at all (unless they get an infestation or if their health appears to be affected).
Please consider worming them for both round and tapeworm every three months, irrespective, unless you *never* take them on anyone else's ground.
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Sorry, I was updating my previous post while sally was also posting. I think the umbelifer (it's a class of plants with those flat seed heads made up of lots of small usually white flowers) is hogweed - not the giant one you have to destroy by law, just the good old rabbit feed one.
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Please consider worming them for both round and tapeworm every three months, irrespective, unless you *never* take them on anyone else's ground.
Sorry I didn't quite understand the second half of that. I have considered worming many times over many years and I won't do it, not routinely anyway.
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Dogs pick up tapeworms. Dogs poo tapeworm segments. Sheep eat the tapeworm segments, sheep get cysts in their tissues.
Dog tapeworm affects farmers' livelihoods.
Any dog which walks on farmland should be wormed for round and tapeworm every 3 months.
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Thank you for the lesson. I wasn't aware of which law dictates your last sentence. Could you enlighten me some more by telling me? Or was it your own little personal law? If so, I don't submit to it.
1. My dogs dont walk on anyone's land but mine.
2. Routine chemical poisoning, vaccinating, or any other invasive routine treatment poses health risks to the animal who is subjected to it, and nice profits for the proponents of it.
3. I care about "farmers' livelihoods" about as much as farmers care about the run off water which poisons all the fish in the local beach near me, screwing up the sexes of the fish, genetically damaging all sorts of stuff, and making my two young toddlers very sick last year after they sat on one of the UK's cleanest beaches playing in the "lagoon" which we now know is run off water from commercial farmland, containing a whole host of chemicals and toxins. The day they stop using it because it harms other life, including human life, is the day I will give a damn about their income.
Like I said, I have considered it, at great length, many times and for many years. I have argued with profiteering vets and people like you many a time, so I am not going waste my time giving a mountain of medical detail about the various harm of routine chemical ingestion to prevent this that and the other, been there a hundred times and dont need to go there again. Reason - IT AIN'T LAW. It's your opinion. You are entitled to it. When you tell me what I should and shouldnt do, you are also entitled to stick it somewhere dark and no doubt completely devoid of worms.
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I am a farmer and I am fed up of getting lab reports of tenuicious cysts in the livers of lambs we send deadweight because tourists walk their unwormed dogs on our ground.
As you do not take your dogs on anyone else's ground I give you my permission :-J to not worm them.
We do not take kindly to flaming and aggression on TAS, by the way, but as you are new please take this as a friendly warning.
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Thank you for the lesson. I wasn't aware of which law dictates your last sentence. Could you enlighten me some more by telling me? Or was it your own little personal law? If so, I don't submit to it.
"Should" != "must", A Guest. I didn't see any mention of law.
Please tone it down a notch or two. There are ways of disagreeing and projecting an opposing view that don't involve the use of capital letters.
Thanks,
Dan
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Ha ha, incredible.
I am a dog trainer and I am sick of people struggling with sick or usually behaviourally sick dogs based on advice of vets who only give said advice in order to profit from it, neutering for example to "reduce aggression" which in turn does the exact opposite but as if the vet gives a damn, he has his money already. we can all be sick of something, i am sick of commercial farming practices, but I can't change it as you have a right to do as you wish, and so do I. I didn't tell you what you should or shouldn't do, you took that role on yourself. I merely defended my right to do as I please too within the realms of what's legal and within my opinion on what is morally acceptable.
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I didn't see a mention of law either, I asked if there was one.
Capital letters, how long did you have to hunt for those? Is bold red ok, but capitals isn't. Must make a note of that, and see if you remember that one.
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Re dogs walking on farmland, I couldn't agree more, I have tourists who trespass across my fields too, and if one of my dogs was out when they do it, someone would get severely maimed as the dog is beyond help and is now just living out his days with me. I have signs up everywhere which stops some, but not others. Maybe you could try signs or leaflets or something?
I do wonder how much is due to dogs, I am sure you know far more than me, but in my quite large experience of UK dog owners, 95% believe the utter BS spouted by vets and the dog "industry" as a whole (which is of course mainly pet companies, food makers, and vets, all in bed together quite often too) and have their dogs vaccinated against every possible "risk" and wormed, health checked, MOT'd as the vets so 'cutely' call it, etc etc etc. I rarely meet a single dog owner who has any ability to think for himself while standing in a vet's practice, let alone actually investigate the advice they are given and think twice about following blindly. Therefore I would say at a guess that the great majority of dogs walking on your land ARE vaccinated (sorry that should have been bold red, not caps, I am not shouting, its just a key depression). I am possibly wrong of course, but would love it if you could actually magically find this out, as I would hazard a guess that much like many vaccinations, most wormed dogs still cause you these issues.
Just one very brief example of the type of point I am suggesting MAY (read bold red again) be occurring.....
"In 2010, the largest outbreak of whooping cough in over 50 years occurred in California. Around that same time, a scare campaign was launched in the California by Pharma-funded medical trade associations, state health officials and national media, targeting people opting out of receiving pertussis vaccine, falsely accusing them of causing the outbreak.
However, research published in March of this year paints a very different picture than the one spread by the media2.
In fact, the study showed that 81 percent of 2010 California whooping cough cases in people under the age of 18 occurred in those who were fully up to date on the whooping cough vaccine. Eleven percent had received at least one shot, but not the entire recommended series, and only eight percent of those stricken were unvaccinated. "
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I think you may be confusing vaccination (against diseases such as distemper, parvovirus, etc) with worming, which is a different type of medication. There is no vaccination for worms, unfortunately.
So whilst I agree that probably the majority of dogs which are walked on our land are fully vaccinated, that does not mean that they are not carrying worms. In order to be sure that they were not carrying worms, they would need to have been wormed for all relevant types of worms, including tapeworm, within the last 3 months,
Unfortunately we are not at liberty to prevent people walking their dogs on our land; they are not trespassing, they are using rights of way. Some tourist-y areas do put up signs about welcoming 'wormed dogs under close control' but hereabouts all we are allowed to do is show gentle reminders about leashes for one month at lambing time.
I think you may also be assuming that Dan's note was directed only at you. It was I that used the red bold letters, so I took it that some of his 'tone it down please' was also directed at me. I wouldn't dream of taking offence at that gentle reminder; this is Dan and Rosemary's website, which they run as a public service at no cost to the forum users. We usually try to behave as though we are chatting with each other in Dan & Rosemary's living room, and show them and each other the respect that situation demands.
I am not aware at all of telling you how to behave with dogs which you keep entirely on your own land. My opener was phrased:
Please consider worming them for both round and tapeworm every three months, irrespective, unless you *never* take them on anyone else's ground.
'Please consider' is hardly dictating, I'd have said? Plus, as you say you never do take them on anyone else's ground, then it would not apply to you anyway.
I apologise for the bold red; I was trying to emphasise a fact and was not meaning to shout.
BH and I are commercial farmers, in that we make our living (such as it is) from farming in the uplands of Cumbria. We are also humans making our way in this world. We try to farm with sensitivity to the environment and attention to the welfare and happiness of our livestock, and to the needs of other users of the space which we occupy and use. We try to treat our livestock, the environment and other people with respect and do expect the same. You won't want to agree with me, but so do most of the farmers I know - small family farmers, mostly, ekeing out an existence on the fells and uplands in the beautiful but harsh north of England.
You clearly feel very passionate about environmental damage, overuse of chemicals in medicine and agriculture. That's no bad thing. You'll find me speaking up against prophylactic routine use of antibiotics in many discussions on this forum, and taking part in conversations about how to control harmful weeds on farmland using means other than persistent and damaging chemicals. We've recently been considering the use of invasive fertility treatments, and whether they are ever justified, or only to save a bloodline or breed, or whether their use should be unlimited in agriculture, dog breeding, and other spheres. (I'm in the "natural is best" camp, myself, on the whole, but I do see the drivers for using these techniques to save breeds.)
In my own experience, over a lifetime in varied occupations and interests (it's BH is the lifetime farmer, I've only been at it for the last decade), it is generally unhelpful to make assumptions about people's beliefs and behaviours based on broad categorisation. Even when it is true, ranting and proselytising changes few, if any minds, where thoughtful, dignified and respectful discourse may influence. Just my opinion, of course, and you are entirely within your rights to disagree.
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Well said Sally, and rationally argued. You are one of the most helpful posters on TAS, as well as a great farmer :farmer:
I hope this is the end of this thread now.
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No I wasn't confusing worming with vaccination, I probably didn't phrase it well, I was relating the two points of routinely doing anything because vets say so. I understand worming and vaccinations are very different.
"Please consider" - yes those words are very polite, hence why you selected those. I was referring to the slightly more pushy "Any dog which walks on farmland should be wormed for round and tapeworm every 3 months." - This, considering it's context and the prior immediate posts where i said I didn't worm, was taken no doubt as it was intended to be taken, you telling me what "should" be done. I didn't miss the point or rant, I merely suggested you have no right to tell me what should and shouldn't be done with my dogs, which is what you were doing whether you choose to rescind now or not.
I got a bit lost after the downtalking "i am oh so rational" part, which sits so well next to the bold red and the "all dogs should be...." - obviously the interjection of an administrator caused a need to pull a bit of rank, and again take some moral highground only this time with nice long words instead of shorter red ones.
Plate glass window.
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Oh dear. Aside from the existing comments on tapeworm etc and livestock, all I'm going to say on the worming subject is I hope your dogs never get lungworm!
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You have made some very broad statements about those in the Veterinary profession A Guest. They are in part (I feel) a little offensive and are certainly inaccurate. That being said you may be interested to read Thomas Lonsdale's little manifesto for election to the RCVS on the subject of pet food. He got a fair few votes.
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I raw feed my dogs and no longer vaccinate them beyond first booster after puppy vax, but I DO worm mine every 3-4m as they visit fields where livestock go on.. but also worms can be passed on to children as well as causing many problems including lungworm and even heartworm as mentioned above.
Do you really think a tablet per dog every 3m is such a big deal when it prevents so many problems for multiple species?? You can even worm naturally if you are worried about chemicals - things like verm-x make the gut less parasite friendly and DE can be used to dessicate any parasites present, but both are more effective if you start with an "empty" gut as they have limited use against large numbers
Toxocara, Toxoplasmosis, Tape worm ALL can be passed onto people as well as animals (and the tapeworm is linked to spread from fleas too) and you need a massive worm burden in an animal to see signs. You can also pick up worms from rabbit fleas (or fox fleas).
So tapeworms are actually one of the easiest things to catch, even in a "closed" environment... just sayin' :innocent:
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You could bale small bales, is there someone around which could do it for you. If you don't really need the hay you could bale it and sell it to farmers over the winter. One question is there any ragwort in the field? Am gonna have too much hay over this winter, thankfully am importing some more stock so that should sort that problem out. :)
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Im in a similar position to the OP ( .... not re dogs, I ...Im back on hay now!)
When we lost our big horses we lost our brilliant lawnmowers. We now have about 5 acres of knee high meadow grass. Yes, I intended to top it regularly but other jobs took over and its got away from us.
Do you think its now too long for someone to take as silage? I don't think we can count on a hay-making window any time soon over here
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I'M sure some one will want it ,you could put a big sign on the gate and an advert with your local ag shop or mention it to the neighbour that knows everyone ;)