Baleage

January 2009 has not been the best month on the farm, but inspite of some bad mojo, I decided to try feeding baleage for the first time.

Baleage is based on the ensiling principle, but in a bale of hay instead of a silo. Baleage is hay that is baled at high moisture (40%-60% — dry hay is baled anywhere from 12% to 18% or maybe, but it is pushing it unless a propionic acid preservative spray is used, 20% or a bit higher) very tightly in a round bale and then wrapped in multiple layers of plastic, at least four layers. The plastic wrap and tightly wrapped bale keep oxygen out of the hay. The lack of oxygen and the high moisture encourages the anaerobic bacteriological (lacto bacilus) fermentation, or pickling, of the hay. The pH of properly made baleage should be below 4.0. The baleage is stable until the plastic wrap is removed. Once removed, the bale will spoil in one to two days in warm weather, but it can last for four or five days in cold weather.

Baleage is a high quality, high protein feed. The fermentation process either adds protein or preserves protein that would usually be lost in dry preservation, I don’t know which. Regardless, baleage is a high protein forage, the exact protein content depending on the mix of grass and legumes in the hay. The baleage I am feeding right now, which is just a first cutting grass baleage is about 14% protein. In a few weeks as the sheep approach six weeks before lambing, I will switch to a 16% protein baleage that is second cutting from a grass-alfalfa field. In addition to additional protein, the alfalfa adds additional types and greater quantities of vitamins and minerals. The hay in the second cutting of the field is also finer, less stemmy, so it is more palatable. The last six weeks of gestation are critical for the development of the lambs, and the ewes need the additional protein and vitamins and minerals to meet the demands of the rapidly developing lambs.

However, there is a risk in feeding baleage (or any ensiled feed), less to cows, more to sheep and goats. Improperly “pickled” baleage can harbor and promote the proliferation of the Lysteria monocytogenes bacterium. Infection with lysteria bacteria results in listeriosis, an unpleasant and usually deadly infection.

Before making the decision to feed baleage, I queried a small ruminant (sheep and goats) listserve that I am subscribed to in order to see how real a danger baleage presents. I interpreted the consensus to be that carefully fed (make sure it is well pickled and avoid moldy baleage) baleage is an excellent feed and the risk of listeriosis is low. However, if there is a listeriosis infection, it is possible to lose quite a few animals quite quickly.

So, having weighed the risks and benefits, I decided to give it a try. I am getting fifteen to twenty bales from a guy I know one town over. Each bale weighs about 1,000 pounds, but because of the high moisture content (40% in these bales), there is only 600 pounds of dry matter in each bale, and feed amounts are calculated on a dry matter basis. A sheep or a goat will eat three to five pounds of dry matter per day depending on its stage of production (open, gestating, lactating, growing). I have twenty-five sheep, and currently ten goats, so they will eat about 140 pounds of dry matter per day. In addition, I will be feeding the baleage to the pigs (for the same reasons, good protein, good vitamins and minerals), the twelve of whom will eat two to three pounds a piece, maybe a bit more. The total consumption will therefore be about 170 pounds of dry matter, meaning that one bale will last for three and a half days. When I get rid of the goats — hopefully soon, although I can’t quite bring myself to advertise them — I may run into a problem, but hopefully it will stay cold enough that I don’t end up with spoilage. Spoiling baleage heats up, so it is obvious.

This baleage feeding is definitely an experiment. If I have a single case of listeriosis, if it does not save me money, if the animals don’t do better on it than they would on a good quality second or later cutting alfalfa-grass dry hay, then I will not feed it again. Baleage is not an environmentally sound preserved forage. It creates a tremendous amount of plastic waste. A few pounds of thin plastic sheeting are used in each bale. Therefore, the benefits of feeding it need to be very high to outweigh the cost of production of such waste.

I opened the first bale yesterday. The first thing you notice about baleage is the smell. It smells sweet, so good you almost want to chow down on it yourself. The first cutting of this hay was pretty late, so the baleage is pretty stemmy, but the roughage will do the sheep and goats good. Because I am feeding the baleage to two groups of sheep, two groups of goats, and one group of pigs, I can’t just put a bale out in the field for the sheep to eat free choice. Instead, I stood the bale on one flat end out by the large group of sheep and have been unrolling “sheets” of hay from the bale, which I walk out to the big group of sheep and take out to the other animals in a wheel barrow (the hay is compressed and rolled up like cash register tape, so each sheet is only a couple of inches thick). One turn around the bale seems to weight about forty pounds, or twenty-four pounds, on a dry matter basis, which is about right for the big group of sheet, when I feed them three times a day, if they ate it all. But, they don’t, they reject some, either because it is too stemmy or because they have trampled it, so to make up for the waste, I am giving them a turn and a half. When the sheets unroll without a struggle, feeding this way doesn’t take any longer than if I were feeding small square bales. However, the snow was deeper than I thought where I set this bale, and it is standing kind of cockeyed, which is putting pressure on the lower parts of the bale, making it hard, impossible, actually, to unroll a full sheet without needing to struggle with the hay at the bottom of the bale. I am tearing the sheet at the point and then skipping that little section and starting back up on the other side.

The sheep dug right into the baleage, and so did the pigs. The goats, of course, just nibbled at it, but they will come around, especially because after the Coco and Buzi scare following close on the heels of Izzy’s death I am never ever feeding another single grain of grain to goats on this farm again, so if they don’t eat the baleage, they are going to get pretty hungry.

 

Hay Market

Things at the farmers market (Capital District Farmers Market in Menands, Saturdays, 8am-1pm) are coming along. I am starting to have some repeat customers (Thank you! And tell everyone you know about the farm and where to find me!), which is nice. I still have yet to cover the cost of driving to the market and back, but as I have mentioned before, in the long-term perspective, I am not concerned about that. I am simply using it as a measure of how things are going.

One thing about the market that hasn’t surprised me is that I love being there. I have a deep and longstanding affinity for people, at the same time as I have a deep and longstanding frustration with people, and being at the market enables me to interact with all sorts of people in a way that I find more or less satisfying —  the only part of it that is unsatisfying is that I would like to spend more time with them. In the future, I would like to do more markets, in spite of the fact that they are excrutiatingly tiring, primarily because I cannot bring myself to sit down, even when things are slow. What I don’t want to do, however, is spend my entire weekend at markets. I don’t just like strangers and acquaintances, I also like my wife and would like to spend some time with her. What I would like to do is find a couple of (busy) weekday markets that I could do, in addition to the Saturday market.

While at the market, I remembered that we might be getting a hay delivery. I had intended to call our hay guy to see if he was going to bale on Saturday or Sunday, but I forgot. There was a bunch of stuff in the way of the barn door that needed to be moved, and a few broken bales in the mow. Sure enough, when I came around the bend and the barn driveway came into view, two of the guys were finishing up clearing everything out. I pulled the truck inot the house driveway and walked down to meet them. Luckily, they had only been there about fifteen minutes. They just needed the key to my tractor to use to back the wagon up to the barn with as their tractors were in the field, one baling, the other tedding the alfalfa field across the street. I got the tractor started and pulled it around to the wagon. Once it was hooked up, I hopped off and let the guy out of the bunch of us that backs the wagons up the best take over. I told him that I had to put some stuff in the freezer and that I’d be back down in five minutes. I ran up to the house, heaved the coolers out of the truck, lugged them down to the basement, quickly unloaded them, ran into the house to change from my casual shoes to my boots, and ran back down to the barn, barely even having time to do more than smile and wave to my in-laws who were visiting. Then, for the next three or four hours, we unloaded wagons, 695 bales in all. We had a half hour break in the middle because one of the guys had to go down the road to their place to get a couple of rolls of baling twine.

When I got back up to the house, I sat down to eat pizza and salad. Jen and my sister- and brother-in law were just finishing up. My brother-in-law asked if after such a long day I was tired. I said no and explained that really grueling days don’t tire me out that badly, as if my body shifts into a different gear or something. Then, however, when I got back from feeding the animals, which I ran out to do right after dinner, I changed my answer. As I stumbled around feeding, I realized that I was in fact exhausted and could barely stand steadily. When I got back in, I explained that the reason the grueling day exhaustion doesn’t really register is that it is so satisfying.

 

First Hay of the Season

Jennifer had a board meeting last night and wouldn’t be home until after 9:30pm, so at about 6:30 when I saw my neighbors go by with a loaded hay wagon, I decided to give them a hand unloading. Their two kids are off at college and they often unload by themselves. I had just finished my chores. The only thing I hadn’t done was put the horses out because it was still hot and muggy. I figured they only had a wagon or two, so I could go over, help unload, and then put the horses out at about 8:00 when we finished. On my way up the hill, however, I passed one of their fields and there were four loaded wagons parked in it. “Uh oh,” I thought to myself, “this is going to be a rough first day!”

If you think because you have been carrying a couple dozen five gallon buckets full of water everyday and humping fifty pound feed sacks a quarter mile on your back over to the pig field that you are in shape, just wait until you start unloading hay. Unloading hay works every muscle and system in your body, and the only thing that gets you in shape to do hay is doing hay. Halfway through the first wagon, my muscles were burning and I could barely catch my breath. The good thing about the size of a hay wagon, however, is that just when you’re about to collapse, you get to the end of it, and then you have a few minutes to recover while the empty wagon is moved out of the way and the next full wagon is moved into place.

When I first arrived, it was just my two neighbors and me, but about three quarters of the way into the first wagon, a friend of their son’s that they hire to help them unload showed up. He is a big monster and can throw hay bales all day. I can’t throw a hay bale to save my life. I am pretty well coordinated and can usually pick up physical techniques pretty quickly, but no matter how long I study seasoned hay bale throwers and no matter how much I practice, I just can’t get it down. When I throw a bale, it may only go half as far as I want it to, and when it lands, it doesn’t land just right on the edge so it rolls a few more feet. Instead, it plops flat, thunk, or maybe even lands on the back edge and rolls the wrong way. Then there are those tosses that are so bad that the bale lands all cockeyed on the side edge and bounces five feet in the wrong direction. Then on top of bad aim, there is the fact that my technique sucks, so I exhaust myself. Hay bale throwing is ninety percent technique and ten percent brawn, and if you want to unload five wagons without killing yourself, the only way to do it is with proper technique (of which there are many), but this shopping mall-reared suburban boy just can’t get the technique down. Mastering the technique seems to be something like mastering language: if you don’t start early enough in life, you’ll always have an accent. Our hay guy, who has been throwing bales since he was big enough to pick them up off the ground is as accurate as a major league pitcher, and he doesn’t start sweating until the third wagon, and then only if it is hotter than 90 degrees in the mow. On the bottom row, he throws the bales into place from twenty or thirty feet so accurately that all that I have to do is face the stack and steady the bale with my foot before taking a step back to receive the next one as it comes rolling perfectly into place.

Back at my neighbors’ place some more reinforcements showed up about midway through the second wagon. At that point, we had six people, and with six people, you can unload wagons all day. You form a Y with four people in the mow and you have two people at the wagon, one person pulling bales off of it and one person setting them on the elevator, which carries the bales from the ground up to the mow. The person at the bottom of the Y tosses the bale from the end of the elevator where the bale falls off to the person at the crook of the Y, who then tosses the bale alternately to the people at the right and left ends of the Y. When you are able to make a Y nobody works too hard and things are relaxed enough that you can actually have conversations, which are carried out just shy of a shout to be heard over the rattling of the elevator.

About three quarters of the way through the third wagon, the drive chain on the elevator broke. It was about eight o’clock and had cooled down, so while my neighbor worked on the chain, I zipped home to put the horses out and leave Jen a note to let her know where I was in case she got home earlier than expected. I told them I’d be back in twenty minutes, but it took twenty-five because Monk the Dog had gotten into the trash while I was gone, so I had to clean it up. He had met me at the door all waggy and happy, but when he saw me go into the kitchen he followed me a little apprehensively and then dropped his tail and body down and slunk slowly off when I turned and glared at him after seeing the trash. He knows he’s not supposed to do it, but he can’t help it. I used to holler at him and shove his nose in it, but it didn’t make any difference, so I stopped because I don’t like chastising him like that. Now I just glare at him and then clean it up.

When I got back, my neighbor was still working on the chain, so I helped his wife feed the sheep. By the time we finished, the chain was fixed and we all trudged back up to the mow. Things were slow going after that because the chain was weak and we didn’t want to push it. It’s better to go slow and get it done in one long shot than push it and need to stop every ten minutes for twenty minutes to re-fix the chain. My neighbor will replace the weak chain with a new one.

We finished just about 9:15. Then we all milled about for a few minutes catching our breath and letting our muscles relax. I dropped my neighbor off at the top of the hill so he could tarp the one partially filled wagon in case it rained overnight and then grab his tractor and drive it home. After that I stopped at the house to grab the flashlight and the dog and then we walked over to the pig field to close the chicken coops. Most of the broilers were in their coop so it didn’t take long to round up the rest of them. Then I checked on the broiler chicks back in the barn, who were snuggled and sleeping in a pile. Then I took a shower. Then, finally, I sat down and devoured some left over chicken and a couple of cucumbers. Jen got home at 10:30 amazed to find me awake.

I crashed into bed about ten minutes later and was dead to the world until the alarm clock called me back at 3:45 this morning.