ideas on loose hay systems?

[sickle hocks]

Hello….just getting a farm up and running after a Long absence. It’s going to be organic and on a small scale, and I hope to set things up so I can do most if not all the work by horse. I hoped I could bounce some ideas off folk who were out there doing it, and get some feedback…it’s not the ‘way things are done’ around here so hard to know just how crazy i am…

I’m on the canadian prairies, will probably only have two horses to start, and will mostly be working alone or with my partner. Next year there will be around eight acres of mixed grass/legume hay to put up, probably just a single cut. There will be about eight acres of newly sown hay with maybe some oat cover that I will need to mow to keep the weeds from seeding, but probably won’t amount to much. There will be another ten acres or so of some annual forage, either to put up as greenfeed or swath graze. (sometime down the road there will be around forty acres in hay or cultivation, the rest of the land in permanent pasture.)

I’m imagining biting off 4 acres at a time mowing. Then windrowing with a side delivery. Then gathering with a buck rake. (Dad remembers some simple drags they used instead of a proper buck rake that would be a lot easier to make..) I like to keep my cattle moving across the land to spread manure using portable electric fence so I would like to scatter small stacks (maybe a ton or two?) across the land and in winter hand pitch hay over the electric fence or maybe self feed off the stacks with some kind of barrier. I thought I could bring in some buck rake loads to a stack area and the horses could then slack off while we hand pitched a stack. Maybe too small to keep well, but i could tarp them and build them on pallets??..Probably not much more than a ton an acre to put up.

Any thoughts or obvious pitfalls? Especially regarding matching equipment to scale of job?

Also wondered if a side delivery rake windrow sheds water as well as what we call up here a ‘swath’ from a modern swather (which should probably be called a windrow and a windrower….) I wondered if it would shed water equally well so that i could use a portable fence / swath grazing program on the annual forage and not bother with handling/stacking it..

thanks so much for your thoughts, i know the learning curve is going to be huge
murray

[Lane Linnenkohl]

Smaller stacks will work fine if they’re shaped right. Conical with a rounded top. We’ve been stacking on 4 wooden pallets set in a square. So the base is about 10 feet square. Make a solid base and go as high as you can go without toppling it. walk it down and compact it as you build it. It will still settle a lot after the stack is done. I’ve never tarped one. I’m guessing your climate might be drier than ours, so I doubt you’ll need a tarp.

Get hold of Lynn Miller’s Haying with Horses on Inter library loan if you can. He gives a good description of how they build stacks. Take your time and build good stacks. It’ll be worth it in the hay you’ll save. We tried a short cut last year and lost a lot of hay because of it. Went back to our old way this year and the hay’s much better.

I don’t let critters feed directly off the stacks. I work too hard making hay to see animals trompling half of it into the mud. I pitch hay off of stacks to critters.

Hope this helps.

[sickle hocks]

Thank you Lane…I had a look at your website too, and really enjoyed it. I’m just reading miller’s ‘haying with horses’ now.

I don’t have the horsepower or people power to make use of even a small stacking apparatus, but I worry that I’m on the edge of having too much hay to handle by pitchfork. If we are blessed by rain up here it will come right at haying time, so speed becomes an issue. More kids and community would have been the traditional solution i suppose.

Not sure if it’s ok to ask, but wondered how much hay you manage to put up with your hay wagon, four pallet stack system? Did you ever use a center pole stack like the eastern europeans, or as gene logsdon talks about?
cheers..

[Lane Linnenkohl]

We cut anywhere from 6 to 10 acres. Most get two cuttings, some only one then grazed. Depends on weather, timing, help.

Heavy first cuttings I’ll only mow an acre or maybe two at a time. Later thinner cuttings we’ll mow from 3 to 5 acres. We load it all by hand so We don’t want more down than we can get up and stacked in a long day or day and a half.

Never used a pole system. I had read early on that if you don’t get the hay just right around the pole at the top, water can run down the pole and the whole stack gets ruined. Too scared to try it I reckon. The way we do it worked from the first and saw no reason to change.

You didn’t ask, but our wagon bed is 12 feet long and 6 wide. We get as much hay on it as we can for each load. Two wagon loads will make one of our stacks.

[near horse]

Hey Murray –

Over in the equipment section I just posted some links to plans for building an overhshot stacker, buckrake etc Just in case you’re building something for your loose hay setup.

All the best!

[Lane Linnenkohl]

I took a quick photo of a handful of hay from one of our hay stacks. As dry and green as the day we put it up.

[sickle hocks]

That site has all sorts of interesting plans, thanks Geoff!

Hay looks good, Lane…did you have a guestimate for how many tons you fit into one of those stacks?? still adjusting my brain from bales…

[Lane Linnenkohl]

@sickle hocks 23710 wrote:

Hay looks good, Lane…did you have a guestimate for how many tons you fit into one of those stacks?? still adjusting my brain from bales…

It is only a guess and may not mean much, but I’d say it has to be at least a couple tons.

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