Well we have a couple of cuttings under our belt (we being myself and my teenage boys and daughter) - it has been a great experience for everyone, many challenges, many obstacles overcome, much learned and hay in the barn for sale.
We wanted to redo our fields (one field of 5 acres and one field of 7 acres) last fall, but felt we needed to get our tractor/hay equipment vetted and field used. Even with old equipment, i.e. sickle mower, tedder, rollabar type rake, New Holland 68 baler and haywagon - all of which has been refurbed or rebuilt over the past year, I think we are now ready for the next step in our hay odyssey - and that is redoing our fields this fall. We have one more cut over the summer and after that we'll will begin the effort to renew these old fields.
The original intent was to convert these fields to 100% timothy. We are selling small squares and it just seemed to us that the $$'s in hay was quality timothy to the horse folks. Then I started looking at orchard grass in one field and timothy in the other - with the hopes that their different mature dates would keep us from putting all of our eggs in one basket/hay type. If it's dry when the OG comes-in, we are gold, later if it's wet when the timothy comes-in, well we got the OG. However, our mind is changing on this - towards timothy which I speak to below.
Some of our lessons learned is that only a few (maybe one) hay customer really knew anything about cutting hay before it went to seed and the quality of it. The horse folks - all they seem to know is timothy is good, clover is bad and OG is OK - if you can't get timothy. Another lesson learned is - our place is out of the way. It's not a bad drive to our fields, but you need to be out of hay in your neck of the woods before you come to ours. Hard to get folks excited about buying OG from us, when everyone else sells it - everywhere around us. The options it seems is - hope for a drought so there is demand (LOL), drop the price or offer something with a better calling card than OG. We are thinking 100% timothy - no OG at this point - we'll see.
So we've got all the thatch off our fields via our hay cutting - one more to go between now and late August. We've hit our fields with 24-D early this spring and will again in a few days - just to knock down the weeds prior to round-up time and also to give us some weed free hay to sell. We've got soil tests and are locked and loaded for lime and fertilizer.
Whatever we re-seed into our fields, it has to be no-till. We are the Saudi Arabia of rocks, so plowing is not an option at this time.
A few questions:
1. Should we kill off everything with round-up or just plant our new hay into what grass we've got - it's pretty thin in most spots? How effective is round-up at truly killing everything - or will there still be some native grasses next year? Would a dense stand of timothy do just as good a job of curtailing the weeds over time as round-up, along with 2,4-d to control the broadleaf/weeds each year?
2. Given the short life of timothy - I'm reading 3-4 years sometimes and then reseeding - is it wise to just over-seed timothy every year to maintain the stand?
3. I've read that timothy is pretty much a 1 cut deal - might get a second cut, but that first cut is a very high yield.
4. If we kill everything down with round-up or just plant timothy with the hopes that it will out compete the native grasses and what OG we have - along with proper lime and fertilizer application - either way, we are seeding onto sod, not cultivated soil. It sounds like drilling timothy puts the seed to deep and dropping out of a seeder or broadcasting it works well? I'm a bit skeptical about broadcasting timothy, but if all you are doing with a seeder is dropping the seed out of the tubes on the ground in a row - can't be that much different in application from a spreader, except control. How do I deal with the sod vs cultivated dirt when seeding timothy? Should I drill, drop or broadcast the seed?
5. If it's hard to sell to folks that cutting hay prior to going to seed is a good thing, I have this funny feeling that the buyer of timothy ain't going to be convinced that they are buying timothy unless it's got that big seed head on it - which to me says it's going past maturity and the quality suffers. How do you and your customers deal with this?
Long post - lots of questions.
Any tips, advice, cautions are much appreciated.
Thanks!
Bill
The Path Forward - What's Next On The Hay Odyssey
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