How do they store the hay where you guys are? Hay bales? What size and shape? Do you use those silage wrappers?
Do you use haystacks? What kind?
Ours are 80 pound rectangular bales, just condensed by the baling machine and tied with plastic bailing twine (which makes decent impromptu ropes so we save a bunch of it). From what i gather, every farmer in our area either has their own baling machine and swather (swathe cutter? Harvester? Idk wtf theyre called. The big machine that cuts the hay) or rents/hires out someone elses, ive seen everything from 1/2 ton cylindrical and square bales to like 25 pound square bales. They seem to leave the hay spread out in the field in neat rows for a week or two to dry before they bale it, then a lot of the bigger bales are stacked up and covered by a tarp (there is a local business that specializes in providing tarps specifically for hay, and these stacks are like 100ft long by 25 wide, so these are fuckhuge tarps.) and then sell them somehow, to someone? Idk. The smaller ones some farmers sell to local businesses or store in their hay barns, which usually are steel sheds. Theyre like, a roof suspended 30ft in the air with walls that only go halfway up on some sides (for ventilation i guess?). Or our neighbor just carted in a prebuilt wood shed. and were taking it out of there and stacking it out in the open with a tarp we got from the hardware store, because we dont have a proper hay barn, or even a horse barn.
I have no idea on the specifics because ive never worked on a farm, we just own horses for my mothers entertainment, and the only step in the process im involved in is stacking the hay on our lot and dragging a bale into the pasture every night.
Frankly im concerned because now we have so much free hay we wont be able to feed it all to them before it starts to mold. Last year we put it on wooden pallets but they rotted and broke down so now its just on the ground. If we put a tarp under it thatd make it worse because water would seep in and pool on that tarp instead of mostly draining away. So im probably just going to break the moldy bales out and spread them around the yard to fertilize the lawn, because the soil on the hill we live on is like 90% clay/silt for a solid 30ft and only the native brush and st jahns wort will colonize it. well have to start buying hay again in december or something. But whatever, free hay, right?
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 14526320 times)