Preserving on a cattle farm

Summer is a time of growth and abundance.  Out here on the farm, we are enjoying lots of goodies coming out of our house garden and getting ready for the late summer onslaught of canning and preserving that comes with plentiful tomatoes, root crops, berries and herbs.

But we have another bumper crop that peaks in late June.  The pastures!  I like to think of  harvesting all that grass as engaging in preserving on a grand scale.  Picture snipping a few basil plants and hanging them to dry, but for 80 cattle for 6 months! 

The process is fairly simple in theory.  Cut the fields when they are at their peak nutrition. 

Wait two to three days for the crop to dry out as much as possible, then use a large rake to flip the forage and let it dry some more.  Farmers then assess the moisture content of the grass to decide whether it is ready to bundle together for the winter (usually below 20% moisture).  This bundling is called baling.  Here at Doublejay Farms, we do round baling, which involves feeding the hay into the baler in an ever growing spiral of hay until it reaches the size you want (5ft diameter for us!), at which point the big cylinder gets wrapped in twine and dumped out the back of the machine.  Next bale!

Of course, haying in practice is a lot more complicated.  Add in unpredictable weather both on the micro-scale ("My hay was almost dry enough! Where did that thunderstorm come from?!") and the macro-scale ("June was so wet this year we couldn't get equipment on the fields without damaging them!") and you'll get a small sense of what hay season is like.