Hay fever

The good kind that is.

That’s not dust, that is pollen from the grass.  The smell is like the most beautiful bouquet.  And I don’t mean the smell of hay, I mean the smell of a diverse stand of grass and forbs in bloom.  Or maybe like TheJaneDear Girls new song, Wildflower…

I saw a dust devil of pollen, 6 more weeks of dry weather??  Or, do pollen devils not count? I don’t know, the moon is right, the sun and wind are right… .  This time of year you cut as soon as you see some good weather coming.  We don’t have it so bad here really, our summers are mostly dry anyway, if it’s dry here from July through September it’s not a drought, it is a normal Pacific Northwest summer.

I won’t bother you with a post about how to make large quantities of hay, we are more concerned about quality.  Most of the time discussions about making hay are all about horsepower, tonnage, and how many cuttings you can brag about.  Life in the Dilbert cubicle meets farming.  When you’re locked away in that cab, you are as isolated as the poor guy in his cubicle at Intel.  I can’t tell you how many bales of hay it took for my brother to wear the paint off the fender of his tractor while he rested his arm on the fender so he could watch the haybine and baler, and I have no idea really how many it has taken for Hangdog to keep it smooth after the initial paint was worn off.  But it’s a lot.  You have to look back at the equipment most of the time to make sure everything is working right, hence the polished fender.

Lots of things to see in the hayfield.

Or at the edge of the hayfield…

A mixed stand is good.

I think making hay is a continual process, it is so much more than just the mechanics and numbers of the actual harvesting.  The composted manure we apply to the hay fields takes all winter to gather in a deep bedding system, the barns are then cleaned, the bedding pack is piled and aged, and then spread on the hay fields.  Most hay sold is either fertilized with conventional fertilizers or bio-solids.  These fertilizers really make the grass grow tall, which makes for tonnage, which is important to hay sellers; they are selling by weight so they need to stretch those numbers.  But there is always a trade-off.  The conventional fertilizers don’t favor forbs, so the fields become monoculture grass stands and diversity goes out the window.  There is some very nutrients dense “weeds” in our hay.  Most conventionally raised hay, unless it is marketed as native grass hay, is re-seeded every few years to maintain a “clean” stand of whatever monoculture the hay farmer is selling.  Alfalfa, timothy, orchard grass are a few common ones.

It may be different in your area, but here in my town most of the hay that is sold, is kept separate from the workings of the farm, or even worse, most hay sellers in our local don’t even have livestock to help rejuvenate what they are taking off of their land.  It’s a continual cycle of mining  that pretty much goes un-noticed, even by people who are in the know about taking care of the earth.  Most times even if the hay seller has livestock he will keep the livestock in their designated areas, and never let them tread on the hay ground.  That’s fine if you’re well heeled and can afford to continue buying fertilizer and seed so the folks at the feed store make a decent living.  It doesn’t really help your farm, as you go farther and farther backwards in succession.  But a well-thought out symbiotic farm (Polyface comes to mind) where the inputs purchased and gathered are carbon in the form of wood chips, sawdust, and straw etc., to use in the bedding of the livestock on the farm during inclement weather, which in turn is composted and put on the hay ground that gets depleted by having less animal impact.  Not nearly as convenient as buying fertilizer for sure, and if you’re home spreading compost or manure on your fields, you don’t have time to be at the coffee shop bragging.

So, following the Polyface model, which is not new by any means, it is what farmers used to do when animals were a large part of farm life – we try to shepherd the livestock manure process as much as we can.  We don’t haul manure out in the winter when the soil is cold and dormant and can’t utilize it, we capture it with carbon that has been brought in and save it for when the pastures can handle it.  In our case, the composted manure gets spread on hay fields after harvest.  We have grazed the hay fields at least once prior to harvesting the hay, but the cows will not come back to the hay field for some time, so unlike where they can graze and can fertilize the paddocks themselves, the hay ground gets shorted without us stepping in and adding fertilizer.  Think of it as part of the Slow Food movement, only for livestock feed.  Instead of feeding the plant, we are feeding the soil.  Composted manure is alive and nurtures all the soil life.  Chemical fertilizers destroy that; they enable the grower to get a higher yield, but that is about it.

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