Hay Time

After moving heifers and dry cows from pasture to pasture, weaning calves, and receiving a truckload of alfalfa yesterday morning, we turned our attention to our hayfields. I ran our cutter/conditioner through our remaining ten acres of sudex, which we project to bale green on Wednesday. Late this morning after the dew has dried, a couple of our employees will join in with our conventional hay mowers to help me cut about 40 acres of bermudagrass. We've got a long day ahead of us!

In other news, I made a few slight updates to our farm website over the weekend, most notably adding links to old articles about us at the bottom of our "farm news" page.

Adding Alfalfa

We've made the decision to begin feeding alfalfa to our milking herd for the first time since 2000. We have not used it in the past several years because of it's high cost and our ability to grow all of the forage we need (when we get enough rain). We will substitute the alfalfa for the dry ryegrass hay we are currently using in the TMR, and will have to alter the formula of the dairy feed blend we've been adding to it. We will continue to use wheat baleage, cottonseeds, and cotton hulls.

Speaking of forages, we've got approximately 200 dry bales of hay we harvested this spring, and if we can get "normal" rainfall and warm temperatures into late September we should get 300-400 bales of bermudagrass. We've also got enough baleage to feed for 70 more days, by which time we should have some corn baleage, corn silage, and possibly even some sorghum-sudangrass baleage.

The key is rainfall and temperature. If the weather is wet and warm over the next three months, we should be able to make it through this drought ok.