Back corner field, half-full of hay balesWe’ve been posting a lot of photos over on Instagram recently, including the one above. If you use that app you should follow us. Sweetbreads takes some great photos throughout the day. I get to live vicariously through her updates, it’s fun. She also tweets a lot of them, so you can see them on Twitter if that’s more your style.
If you already follow us then you’ve seen that we hayed some of our pastures last week. Before we started farming I didn’t really think too much about haying. Grass grows, you cut it, bale it, and feed it to animals in the winter (or in a drought). No big deal.
It turns out, however, that there’s a lot more thought put into it than that. In fact, we almost didn’t cut any hay at all, and when we have more animals in the future we most likely won’t. This is because haying takes nutrients and organic matter off of the land and not all of it gets returned. By making hay you are removing the fertility of the land. This impacts the nutrition of your grazing animals as well as the following year’s growth. If you consistently take hay off the land and you don’t return that hay in the form of manure (or fertilizer) your land will suffer.
