Measure Twice, Cut Once

That is the plan and after a week or so of fixing and hauling home some very old but much loved farm equipment, I think we are just about ready to start. If you have made hay before then you know that one of the most important ingredients is lots of sunny, dry, hot weather.

The weather man is saying we will get 4 days of it so I think I will cut the first field - 5-6 acres today - and then see if the sunny weather holds. Then maybe in a couple of days the second field 3-4 acres.

Our haying story starts when we first moved to the homestead and I thought I would cut all my hay and put it up by hand. Well I had good intentions and I did buy the right scythe from the right guy, measured myself and had the handle made to fit me. I cut some and made a couple of hay cocks, even carried it in on the hand cart but when I had the chance to get some free equipment and the use of a tractor for the summer (thanks Mom!). I put the scythe back in the shed.

I think cutting hay by hand is a wonderful way to make hay, but I have made allot of hay with equipment and I know how fast it can go. I can cut, bale and stack under cover my entire hay crop, 9-12 acres in a few days with equipment. By hand you would be looking at I would be guessing here, well over 3 weeks to a month. I just don’t have that much time this year and I need to cut my own hay. For two winters we have been buying and that gets tired real fast when you have to haul it home and pay for it. We had been spending about $1000.00 a year for hay and gas to go get it. So we figured we would buy a few pieces of older, cheap equipment and put up our own. We had the hay just no way to put it up.

The first thing we bought was a self-propelled swather, we got a Massey Ferguson 36 at a farm sale for $500.00. It needed a little work on the cutter, new guards and a few sections; the section bar also broke. So far it has cost around $200.00 to get it ready. We used it to cut the hay fields early in the spring. I needed to knock down two years of uncut old hay growth. It also works great to clip tall weeds and tall mature grass the cows don’t eat in the pasture. That helps allot to keep the pasture clean of weeds and growing even.

The next thing we needed was a baler and it just so happened that my parents needed to clean out some of the old farm equipment that they had been collecting. So I hooked onto my trailer and headed down for a visit. The first thing we hauled back was an old New Holland 269 square baler. All it needed was a tire fixed and a few adjustments to get the plunger to run square. Next was a hay rake, now this piece is vintage - not sure of the date but it is old. With a little TLC, and if I take care handling it, it will rake all the hay I have.

So now I think we are ready to have at it. If all goes well we should have some very nice hay for half the price of buying it, in addition to a line of older but useable haying equipment (not including a tractor). Anyone have a nice tractor for sale cheap?

Update:
We started cutting hay and everything went pretty good, we got all the hay cut with only one break down on the swather, the section bar broke again. We will be making a new one this winter much heavier. Then we raked it and waited for it to dry and waited watching the sky for any sign of rain. We had lots of cloud but we prayed and kept an open line to the Lord and he held back the rain. God is good. After all that waiting and walking the field with a pitchfork, the swather made allot of little piles of hay as it was cutting and there needed to be pulled apart so that the hay would dry evenly. We where then ready to start baling the hay into little square bales and that went very well, until I broke both hay needles. We did get one field finished and the hay stacked. Now we are off to get the baler fixed and we should be able to finish the rest in the next couple of days God willing and the creek don’t rise as there say.

Tags: Hay making, Homesteading, Livestock, Small scale farming

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Homesteading, Livestock, Organic Gardening, Small Scale Farm, This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.