Haying Season

“Hay, now.” I’ve spent two farming seasons on farms that keep livestock – sheep, cattle, and a horse at one, just cattle at the other. Sweethearts, all, but they do get hungry. Both places do the grass-fed thing (and for a lengthy and accessible discussion of raising cattle on grass vs. grain, see Omnivore’s Dilemma). As you may know, this means the rhythm of summer is moving cattle to fresh grass every few days. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of work involved, in maintaining fences and monitoring how much grass there is and where. But summer work also means winter prep – haying - one of the most time-sensitive farm tasks.

The haying sequence, for all you city folk, is: mowing a grassy field, waiting a few days for the cut grass to dry out, driving over it and making bales, loading the bales onto a wagon and then storing them in a big, dry barn. The whole process takes about three days and, depending on the weather and field’s fertility, can be repeated two or three times in one growing season. The most crucial consideration is moisture: while dry grass will store in a mow for ages, wet grass will at best rot and at worst start a fire (rotting gives off heat).

So during haying season, farmers keep a close watch on the weather predictions, and when three days of sun and dry come around haying moves to the top of the to-do list. As with most farming tasks these days, there do exist machines that will do almost every step of the haying process, up to stacking the bales in the barn. But at the farms where I’ve worked, we’ve loaded and stacked bales on the wagon by hand. It’s hot, heavy work that can take out your lower back, but I find the concrete, finite nature of the task rewarding.