What am I doing? Hay

I’m sitting down to write this month’s column, and I don’t have anything in particular to tell you all about. I spent all day cutting and then merging second-crop hay, trying to think of what I’ve been doing or thinking about since last month’s column, and I guess all I could recall was a whole lot of what I was doing presently: making hay. That’s probably not that interesting to you all as a subject, seeing how many times I’ve written about doing hay, so I’ll come up with something better.

I lied; still going to talk about hay, at least a little. I haven’t actually been doing hay every day for over a month. First crop only took us five days or so to put up. If I include all the getting ready and then putting things away, it was more like a week and a half. I buy hay out of the field from other farms and wrap it, so another week was spent wrapping purchased hay.

Then, our barley and pea cover crop on our new seeding hay ground was ready. We cut that and chopped it. The weather was weird this spring; or maybe it was the drought we’ve had that affected the small grain height. Regardless, the yields were disappointing. It looked and smelled like nice feed, but there just wasn’t much of it.

A family friend decided to quit making hay and offered to rent us a 16-plus-acre field of grass low ground and alfalfa grass mix upper ground. We put that up as dry round bales for the dry cows and bred heifers, as it was pretty mature by the end of June. After all that, it was already time to start cutting the second crop of hay.

We’ve been on the edge of drought for four out of the last five years. Last year was pretty good for us. We never had too much rain last year but had plenty of timely rains that made for great grazing conditions and pretty decent hay yields. This year has been back to drought conditions. Most of April, May and June were really dry at our farm. Storms have been splitting and going both north and south of us but rarely over us and blessing us with a shower. In the last week, though, we’ve gotten lucky, and a few showers have shown up and dumped some rain on our parched pastures.

This year is the first time I think I’ve ever seen grasses go dormant before mid-June. Usually, that’s an August or September thing. The 1.3 inches of rain we’ve had in the last seven days, as well as a smaller amount the week before, have woken those grasses back up, though, so they will hopefully stay that way the rest of the summer.

Our kids just got back from showing some of their 4-H animals at the Cannon Valley Fair. Hannah showed a calf there with some friends last year, and this year, Jonnie took a heifer as well. They signed themselves up, coordinated what supplies and cattle to bring and drove themselves and their cattle to the show. Emily and I just went down there on show day to watch them show. It’s a fun exhibition to go to as it is open to 4-H and FFA kids from any county that feel like signing up, so we see lots of friends there from all around the areas surrounding Cannon Falls. They also have a district Holstein show there, which I showed cattle at a couple of times when I was around the kids’ ages. I’m not sure if the kids were there for the showing part or to have an excuse to hang out with their friends all day, but I suppose it could be both reasons.

I need to head to bed so I can get up and milk cows, then finish merging the last couple of fields for Dad and Jonnie to chop before I rake hay for baling in the afternoon. Until next time, keep living the dream and just know that, if it’s summer and you see me, we’re probably going to talk about hay. Gotta make it while the sun is shining.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.