Friday, July 30, 2010

No, we didn't drop off the face of the earth...

We've just been busy and the blog got abused. We have put up a lot of hay this year(probably around 850 acres). I think we have put over 1,500 bales on the baler this year, all on dry-land hay! We put up a bunch of hay and our neighbor hired us to do his as well. Most of the time Dad would cut out a field and then Mom and I would take turns cutting. Danny and Jessi would usually rake although Mom got her fair share of it. Dad and I were the the balers. It took us about two weeks to get everything finished. The rain kind of tapered off starting late in June so we hardly had any hay get wet. However, we could use the rain now.

Now for the pictures!

This picture was taken from the tractor in "thinner" hay,

Here is a blurry picture of some windrows,

Good hay,

Here is a pasture we decided to hay. We worked it up about five years ago and planted alfalfa in it. The hay wasn't too bad considering it used to be almost bare here. We still got about a bale and a half an acre, but compared to the field in the above pictures, which we got about three bales an acre, it didn't look so good. Although what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality.

Here I am baling.

An aerial shot of our best field.

I still have an extremely late post I started in the middle of June that I still plan on posting.



D.J.

3 comments:

  1. Hi D.J.
    Thanks for all of the pictures! Looks like you have been busy... :-) We have been scrambling to put up hay as well, so I know exactly how you feel!
    Keep up the good work!
    Andrew B.

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  2. That sure is a lot of hay! Did you get a better harvest than other years because of the rain this spring?

    We are still waiting on the neighbor to get ours done...

    Peter

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  3. Yes, we got a much better harvest than usual off the dry-land hay. For example in 2007 we got 130 bales off the 75 acre field east of our house. That was the most we had ever gotten off that field until now. This year we got somewhere around 220 off of it. And that was with our new baler that makes heavier bales. We did fertilize it and plant sweet clover in it last year so that probably helped, but I think the rain helped the most.

    D.J.

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