Sunday, August 15, 2010

Hay & Grazing Update

We finished baling our hay early Friday afternoon without any further mechanical or weather issues. We had a light yield this time, thanks mostly to the lack of July rainfall. Taking our superb first cutting into account, though, our hay inventory is about where it usually is in mid-August. We'll get our bermudagrass fertilized soon and will hope to be cutting it again in late-September.

Our next little bit of field work will involve harvesting a 10 acre field of sudex as baleage. We'll mow it, "green" bale it the next day, and then silage wrap the bales.

Speaking of sudex, we planted this crop in a few grazing paddocks and turned our milking herd into one for the first time this summer. It gets too hot too early for our cows to both graze and eat TMR, and so far we've opted to keep feeding their TMR twice a day. At their current low level of milk production, though, we're going to try to give them a heavier evening feeding and graze them from 5:30-7:30am. We may still see a further drop in production, but grazing may still be a more economical choice with the price of feed increasing lately. Time will tell.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

So glad the GPS worked! WE are getting on board with the same thing only with our planting and harvesting. I attended a John Deere info meeting to learn all about their APEX program, since my husband said I am his computer guru! He used to have a dairy here on the farm, but the family quit milking about 3 months before we married. I did know the back end of every cow when we dated because we did most of our catching up while he milked 6 at a time!

I'm a new follower. Please stop by for a visit before you are slammed with harvest! I have some blogs that focus on silage and round bales along with all the family/kids stuff! I'm at www.walkingtheoff-beatenpath.blogspot.com up and over in northwest Indiana