What day is it?

Starting around May 25 until sometime mid-June, I fall into a parallel universe where my general sense of time ceases to line up with everyone else’s. We’ll call it the haying season universe. I may think it’s a Monday, but when I call the implement dealer to order a sprocket for a broken chopper box, I find out it is actually Saturday and they closed three hours ago.

One day can stretch infinitely long with so many tasks accomplished, problems occurring and people to coordinate that there is no way that much happened in one day. Other days can pass quickly by doing a single thing like cutting hay or doing a big repair on a tractor. The only real problem with falling into a parallel universe is that everyone else is still in the usual one where Saturday, May 30, occurs at the correct point in sequential time, not on June 1 or May 29.

I nearly missed submitting this column, for which I sincerely apologize to the very patient staff of the Dairy Star. I received a helpful email warning me that my column was due soon, but we needed to get heifers vaccinated and some compost hauled on the fields we’d harvested before it hopefully rained, so I decided I’d get it written over the weekend when I’d hopefully have some time in the house.

Apparently, the weekend occurred in the normal universe a day or two before it did in the haying universe, so I’m writing this early in the morning before I head down to do chores. My plan had been to write it last night, but we finished up chopping barley and pea silage around 5 p.m. and it took until 8:30 p.m. to get all the equipment blown off and packed away and the bag closed up. By then, I lacked motivation to do anything but cool down in the pool at my parents’ house and go to bed. Ninety-degree days have that effect on me and also the cows. We don’t live here because we enjoy tropical climates.

The climate this spring and early summer hasn’t been a very ideal one for our type of farming. There wasn’t very much snow melt this spring to refill the soil with moisture after a fairly dry fall last year. Since the snow melted, we’ve missed a lot of the rains or gotten much less than preferable when it did rain. In the last 30 days, we’ve received 1.9 inches of rain at our farm, which is half of the normal precipitation rate, and most of it came as hundreths-of-an-inch rainfalls.

On top of that, it’s been abnormally hot; great weather for growing corn, but not great for pastures and hay. I thought when we started hay that yields would be terrible. It turned out better than expected but still probably averaged out to be a whole bale an acre less than the usual and two less than exceptional. The high spots and anywhere with light soil were pretty disappointing, but the low areas with heavy soil made up for that a bit. I’m thankful we didn’t have the worst scenario where it’s dry but we get a big rain event that drowns the low areas after it runs off the high spots too quickly to do any good.

We had a thunderstorm roll through this morning and break our multiweek dry spell. Hopefully, it’s the first of many quarter-inch rainfalls that get the pastures going again and set us up for a good second crop of hay. It’s perfect timing for our new seeding we just chopped the cover crop off of yesterday. More rain is predicted over the next couple days, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it’s a more accurate prediction than most have been this year.

Until next time, keep living the dream and watch out for those parallel universes. Quantum physicists may understand your problem of being in all possible places at once except the one they expect you to be, but most people you deal with won’t.

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