Looking for advice on buying hayland

First post!  Thanks for the resource.  

 

We want to expand our cattle herd and reduce the summer grazing we do.  We have some cash on hand for this.  We could buy/lease more pasture for grazing and start cutting our irrigated meadows.  I don’t like this idea because of our short growing season (one cutting only!), my incompetence with mechanicing, and we don’t have any haying equipment beyond one good tractor and one smaller, ok tractor.

 

What I’m think is buying irrigated hayland and leasing it out.  Part of the lease is that we would get between 250-500 tons of grass/alfalfa mix.  Then we would rough our stock through the loooooong winter on a mix of stockpile forage and alfalfa/grass (we do this now with our small herd and it works well for us.)

 

Farm leases are way out of knowledge base, but I’ve heard about 1/3 - 2/3 agreements.  Locations of hayland could be highly variable. Places that grow great grass and get 3 cuttings a year would be best. SD, Nebraska, Kansas to the east or ID, Wash to the west.  We would have to pay to truck the hay, so I don’t want it too far.  

 

In my early searches I’m finding the competition between row crop vs. hayland might be a problem for some places like Kansas and Nebraska.

 

Ok, might be a crazy idea.  And if it is I would like to hear about it!  If doable then ideas on how to structure leases would be appreciated greatly.

Looking for advice on buying hayland