Making Hay When the Sun Shines
Kendall and Rebecca discuss haying in New England, emphasizing the importance of timing and quality. Carl Majewski, a forages and field crop specialist, explains the process of making hay, from mowing to baling, and highlights the significance of cutting grass at the right stage for optimal nutritional value. They discuss the benefits of growing grass in New England, and the importance of soil and hay testing to ensure quality feed. Kendall and Carl note the impact of weather on hay production and the need for proper storage and equipment maintenance.
Show notes:
Carl Majewski: carl.majewski@unh.edu
Sarah Allen, Dairy Production State Specialist: sarah.allen@unh.edu
Some Hay Testing Options:
Dairy One: https://dairyone.com
Cumberland Valley Forage Lab: https://www.foragelab.com/
Equi-Analytical Hay Analysis: https://equi-analytical.com/
NH County Offices providing hay probes for use:
Hillsborough County – Kendall.kunelius@unh.edu
Rockingham County – Jesse.wright@unh.edu
Merrimack County – jessica.descoteaux@unh.edu
Carroll County – Olivia.saunders@unh.edu
Grafton County – heather.bryant@unh.edu
Sullivan County – seth.wilner@unh.edu
Coos County – william.hastings@unh.edu
Hay Testing Video: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/taking-hay-sample-video
Soil Testing Information and resources: https://extension.unh.edu/agriculture-gardens/pest-disease-growing-tools/soil-testing-services
Upcoming Extension workshops: https://extension.unh.edu/events
UNH Cooperative Extension: www.extension.unh.edu
Women in Ag Newsletter signup - https://unhoutreach.tfaforms.net/217751?CID=701G0000001AiKCIA0
Kendall Kunelius – kendall.kunelius@unh.edu
Rebecca Dube – rebecca.dube@unh.edu
Transcript:
Kendall Kunelius 0:09
Welcome to this episode of Shared Soil, a podcast dedicated to creating community, honoring challenges, and encouraging personal and professional growth for all people in agriculture. My name is Kendall Kunelius, and I'm a field specialist in the area of agricultural business management.
Rebecca Dube 0:25
And I'm Rebecca Dube, providing administrative and technology support to Extension.
Kendall Kunelius 0:29
So, our episode today, Rebecca, is actually a topic that's pretty near and dear to my heart. And as we see the sun shining outside, we're coming into that time of year when the grass starts to grow and leaves are coming out. This is a really ripe topic to be talking about. So today our topic is going to be all things haying. I think this is an interesting topic that has a big reach. It's a common feature among all sorts of agriculture, right? Whether you have beef cattle, whether you've horses, goats, sheep, chickens, etc. It's really a thing that people have in common, and yet I find it's the kind of thing where people are strongly opinionated about hay and haying and forages and grasslands in New Hampshire. So we're gonna dig into that today.
Rebecca Dube 1:12
Well, maybe you can tell me something right off the bat, then. What's the difference between hay and straw?
Kendall Kunelius 1:16
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think it's important to delineate for this episode. So, when we talk about hay specifically, I'm talking about an item that is produced to be eaten by an animal, right? So it's going to have more leaf material. It's a grass, whereas straw is actually more like that hollow tube. I mean, think about a drinking straw, right? And it typically comes from an annual crop that's a cereal grain; so things like wheat, barley, rye, oats. You can have all kinds of different straw, but it's not typically designed to be eaten as much as it is designed to be a good bedding. We like straw because it's got good insulatory properties, it holds warm air in those straw tubes, but it doesn't have the leaf material and nutrition content that a grass hay would have.
Rebecca Dube 1:59
Oh, okay. Well, then we better get on with it. You know we gotta make hay while the sun shines.
Kendall Kunelius 2:04
Yes, we do!
Rebecca Dube 2:06
So we're gonna take advantage of this situation and talk today with Carl Majewski, who is the forages and field crop specialist for UNH Extension. Carl, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Carl Majewski 2:19
Yeah. Hi Kendall, hi Rebecca. Let me see, I've been with Extension for, it'll be 24 years in July, and I work on the dairy and livestock team. I'm the one who does most of the stuff with the soils and crop end of things, so I work a lot with forage crops and hay crops, as well as corn and small grains and pastures and all that sort of stuff.
Rebecca Dube 2:44
Great.
Kendall Kunelius 2:45
All right, so Carl, I'm gonna dive right in here. I'm going to loosely quote you from a farm visit that we went on once, talking about, I think- I think the farm was talking about establishing a corn field and putting that in. And the offset to that was, should we put corn in here or should we start haying this field? And you, I remember this so specifically because I thought was such a fantastic answer. And you looked at the farmer and you said you know, we have such an advantage here in New England for growing grass. It's almost unfair how well we can grow grass in New England. And I just, I want to start this episode by saying, like, can you give us a little bit of an overview of why is that so? What kinds of grasses do we grow here in New England? Set the scene a little bit for us. If I'm walking through a pasture, what am I gonna - or not a pasture, excuse me, a hay field - what am I gonna expect to see?
Carl Majewski 3:33
Yeah, I mean, in a way, to some people, maybe it's a little bit of a consolation prize, because a lot of New Hampshire is steep, rocky. Our soils tend to be a little heavier in a lot of spaces, other than a few relatively small regions. And those aren't the areas where you can have 100-acre vegetable farms or huge fruit orchards or things like that. That, coupled with our fairly short growing season, means that we're not suited to a lot of types of agriculture. But the one thing that we can grow really well is grass. Grass isn't fussy. We don't need to worry about it being on steep and rocky soil, because if it's on a sod we don't have to till it every year, so it just kind of stays put. Grass is a fairly low-maintenance crop. We fertilize it, we manage it, we want to take good care of it, but it's not something that we have to plant every year. And it does well in a relatively cool and moist climate, like we have here in the Northeast now. While we can't use grass for a whole lot, it just so happens that the animals that we raise for livestock; so cattle, sheep, horses, so on, can make really good use of it. And it makes for pretty cheap feed that's also really high quality. Quality grass is what cattle and sheep have evolved to do well on for hundreds and thousands of years before we ever domesticated them. So you know, hay crop is really a nice niche for New Hampshire, and that's why you see so much of it. I was just looking up something before I hopped on here, and vegetable production amounts to not quite 3200 acres across the state versus over 60,000 acres in hay fields. So you know that that tells you something, right?
Kendall Kunelius 5:35
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think what's so interesting about the hay fields, to what you were saying. I tend to lump hay in the same kind of category as something like Christmas trees. You know, you're establishing a stand of hay, maybe you have some specific hay blends that you're interested in, right? I think about- there's some areas of the state where we can grow alfalfa, some that we really can't - those high, higher value crops is maybe what I'm trying to get at, to say a higher protein. Maybe you want like a Timothy stand, if you're looking for more of a specific texture or sugar content, like a rye, an orchard. I guess, what maybe I'm getting at is, I think what's really great about hay as a crop, if you're establishing it, is you can almost kind of customize the blend to your market in that area. If you've got horse people versus cow people, you know, are you doing haylage versus green chop versus are you doing silage with a corn, or you know, there's options, and there's different end products that end up with what you're actually planting originally. It's not always just a square bale, like we see for decoration feeding to horses. There's round bales, there's wrapped bales, there's all kinds of different end products, and we'll get into that a little bit later. But they all have one thing in common, is the timing is really important.
Rebecca Dube 6:50
Well, Carl, what is the actual process of making hay? You know, we'll start with the farmer standing in the field and ending with that same farmer feeding out a flake of hay to an XYZ animal, if you could cover like feed quality, timing, harvest, storage, maintaining fields, all those aspects. How is hay made?
Carl Majewski 7:11
Okay, so a farmer is going to start out mowing the hay, and he's going to wait until the hay or the grass is at the right stage. You kind of have to get the right point. So grass, the grass that's starting to grow in those hay fields right now would be super high quality feed. It would be really lush, really high in protein and carbohydrates, super digestible. But of course when we're likely to have snow tomorrow, it's trying conditions, right? No, and even if you did, there's just not really any of that grass. You'd have to go around the hay field like 10 times with the rake to get a very wispy row, so your yield would be terrible. On the other hand, you could wait until late July and the grass will be really tall. It'll be waist to chest high, there'll be lots of it, but it's going to be really brown and over-mature, and it will have lost its nutritive value largely because it's mostly fiber. All the protein and all the other goodies are gone. So you have to get that point in between. You want the grass to be grown out so that you've got some good yields, but you want it to be at a stage where it's really leafy and it's going to still have that really good feed value. Once it's at that stage, you're going to mow it. And then most farms making dry hay will use a, what they call a mower conditioner. So not only does it cut the grass at a height of a couple inches, it then feeds them through rollers or fingers that crimps the stem, kind of opens up the stem, and that can help that grass stem to dry out more quickly. Then you're going to let it dry. Ideally you're going to mow when you think you've got two or three good days of bright, sunny, dry weather in a row. In between there you're going to ted the hay. So, a tedder is this implement that you tow behind the tractor. It's got these tines that spin around, and it basically just fluffs the hay up. It kind of mixes it up, lets more air into there, maybe bring some stuff that was at the ground level closer to the top, just so that all of that hay can dry out better once the hay is dry enough. So that means that it's somewhere between 10 to 15% moisture versus the 75 or 80% moisture that the grass was when you mowed it.
Rebecca Dube 9:45
Ok.
Carl Majewski 9:46
Then you're going to rake it up. So that's another implement that will gather up the hay and concentrate it into a windrow, and then you're going to go through with the baler. The baler will just pick up that windrow, compact the hay into a bale, whether it's one of those large round bales or the traditional square bale. It packs it into a bale, and then it's got some sort of mechanism that will wrap it in string and knot it, and then dump it out on the other end. Then someone picks it up, brings it into the barn, and then it's ready for whatever you need to feed it out.
Rebecca Dube 10:22
Wow. I have a question, then, on the shapes. Is there a particular reason that it's one shape or the other? Using my own terms, I'll call it the brick shape or the wagon wheel. Those are mine... but is there a reason that it is put together in a certain way, or is that just because of the particular machine you're using?
Carl Majewski 10:41
I don't know. My guess is that when the first balers came out 80 years ago, or whenever it was, that it was just simplest to have it in a rectangular block. No one wanted to be fancy and have it come out as an octagon or something like that. So just having a rectangular block shape would have been the simplest to engineer. And then as far as the cylinders for those round bales, I don't know how long ago those started. My guess is that it was some sort of development. As far as handling or feeding out or something, that a large round bale, if you have a large bale - that a round shape that you could roll out if you needed to was going to be handier than a similar-sized block, like a rectangular bale, to feed out. I mean, though that being said, there are really large rectangular bales out there as well, and there's equipment that can make these sort of miniature round bales too. So I think it's just a matter of personal preference and what works best on the farm.
Kendall Kunelius 11:27
Okay, yeah. And to add to that too, you know, thinking about the type of equipment that is available to you. So the title of this episode is Making Hay When the Sun Shines, because you need to make the hay while the sun shines, like Carl was just talking about that whole process, right? And in New England, when we know that weather could just change at the drop of a hat, right? It could be snowing in the morning and 60 and beautiful in the afternoon. So, if you have a stretch of three or four really nice days, that is when you are going to cut your hay and make the hay. And sometimes you may get caught in a situation where you have a couple nice days charted and all of a sudden it rains. And you may need to change your plan about then how you're going to treat that hay, or do something with it. If you can't get it to dry and you don't want to ted it two or three or four times, because then you're going to start getting shattering and breakage of the leaf content. You get a lower quality hay, a little more stemmy hay, that's either going to be an impact on your end customer if you over-dry that hay because you have to keep handling it. Or excuse me, rather what I'm trying to say is if you have a lower quality hay because you have to keep handling it many times because you have to get it to dry, well then you may need to change your plan with how you're going to shape that hay. If you have the equipment to do that, just based on the weather dictation, drying, that kind of thing. I also tend to think about the shape and the quality about what you're going to feed it to. As a former horse person, I have so many memories growing up being really selective of hay, and at the time I didn't know why, right? I was like 10, 12, but what I knew I was looking for was really good-smelling hay, and I knew not to feed moldy bales. And as I got older, and I actually took forages and grassland management with Professor Drew Conrad (he's like legendary, you know what I mean). But thinking about all of those contributing factors, like Carl was saying, with the nutritive value of the hay. And then what could we best feed that hay to, in terms of, is it a good cattle hay for the winter, we just need to keep them eating, so that they're staying warm, or is it like a high-performance horse hay, like a really nice second cut that's got a lot more of the maybe sugar content - they need a little bit more caloric value in their diet. Hay is something I firmly believe is both an art and a science that takes to make. And I think there's a lot of different options out there to how you're going to handle your hay, especially with your equipment, and how you're going to treat it. But in terms of baling, I also think there's a big argument to be made that it's also like a customer preference thing. And then, Carl, I want to open it up to you there to share your thoughts on that.
Carl Majewski 14:20
Yeah, I think it's - there's so many factors in there, so there's no one kind of good hay for everybody. Yeah, so when I talk to people about forage quality, I always give that standard Extension answer: it depends. It really depends on what you're feeding to. I'll always start out by asking people, what do I mean by forage quality? And always someone will just say the amount of protein in there, or the amount of sugar, or how green it is, or something. And those are all parts of it, but I always point out that forage quality really, is just depending on animal performance. The quality of a forage is really just depending on how well it supports a given level of animal performance, and so the quality of a hay really depends on what you're feeding it to. Because there's all kinds of different levels of animal performance out there. If I've got a high-producing dairy cow, or if I've got a herd of beef cattle that I'm looking to achieve a good growth rate on, or if I've got a team of workhorses that I'm actively out in the woods doing logging, or a racehorse, or I've got a mare that is nursing a foal. All of those sorts of things: milk production, heavy work, weight gain, that takes a lot of energy. So those animals have a high nutritional demand, the same way that a nursing mother, or someone, or an athlete, or someone like that has a lot more nutritional demand than couch potato. So those are the types of animals that you really want to feed that high quality, highly digestible, high-in-protein hay; because you need to give them a lot of nutrients to support that, because they have a high nutritional demand. On the other hand, if I've got a backyard horse that maybe I take on a trail ride once or twice a week, or a flock of sheep in my backyard that are more pets than anything. They're fully grown, I'm not lambing them out. Maybe I'm shearing them, but they don't have that same high nutritional demand. Then what's good quality hay for them is going to be very different. You still want it to have some nutrients, you know, they still need protein, they still need energy, but it's not nearly as much as those higher performing animals. So, if that hay is still clean, if it's free of mold, if it's well made, but maybe it's a little bit more stemmy, maybe it's just a little bit coarser. That can still meet their nutritional needs and will probably do a better job than that really leafy, soft, highly-digestible second cutting.
Kendall Kunelius 17:16
Yeah, and I also like to think, too, looks can be deceptive when it comes to hay. We can have some sun bleaching, and I'm thinking of other factors that could affect it too. Yeah, sun bleach, or you know, just the texture of the hay. You might have a hay with a lot of Timothy in it, or something that is just a little bit more stemmy of a type of plant to begin with. And so I would always recommend, if there's a question, to test your hay. And I would ask you, Carl, can you walk us through the steps about, like, if somebody invited you as an Extension agent on their farm to test a batch of hay as they're pulling it in from a field? How would you go about that?
Carl Majewski 17:52
Yeah, so I would, I'd start out by saying that a visual evaluation is good, you can get a lot with that. I'm always a fan of breaking a bale of hay open, looking to see- Is it free of mold, is it free of weeds? Is it free of arrowheads, and dry snakes, and beer cans, and any number of all the other stuff that I found in hay bales over the years?
Kendall Kunelius 18:15
Oh yeah, that's- what a question that is! What a great Extension question. What's the weirdest thing you found in a hay bale over the years?
Carl Majewski 18:24
So not as an Extension agent, but when I was in high school and I worked on a farm, every now and then you find dead snakes because they get picked up. There was one time on the farm that I was working at that we were picking up hay, and one of the guys took a bale of hay, put it on the wagon, and it had a live snake in it. It was picked up by the baler, but only halfway, so the other half of it was out there, and pretty white-hot ticked too. I might say, so not happy to be there. So I'd say a live snake, or half a live snake. So, yeah.
Rebecca Dube 19:01
Wow.
Kendall Kunelius 19:02
Yeah, I know we're on the hay-testing question, but I want to just put in a side. Actually, looking for animals and the fauna that is in the same area as a hay field in production is really critical. And I think raking or tedding, forming those windrows, is a good preventative measure to kind of get the animals and the wildlife in the area to move out when you're gonna go in and bale afterwards. We worry about dead animals in the bales because that can cause things like botulism or other disease issues or molding. So while yes, it's a great story, it actually is something that's a very big quality issue to think about. Especially big round bales, when they're, you know, if they're wrapped and stored. That's a lot of hay to lose because you've accidentally baled something up. Okay, sorry. Continue. Hay testing! Visual eval.
Carl Majewski 19:48
Right, so by all means, look at the color. Look to see if there's any foreign materials or weeds or mold or anything like that. See if it looks leafy, that it's got decent color, that it smells okay. But while that can tell you whether you've got well-made hay, you can't tell what the nutritional value is. You might have a fairly good guess, but you're not going to be able to pinpoint it. So that's where lab analysis comes in. So, for lab analysis, what I would always recommend is that you take 10 or 12 bales from a lot, so a lot of hay. Could be from a series of fields, it could be from your first cutting or your second cutting, or whatever. Just some group of hay that it makes sense that they're all similar enough in location or harvesting date, or what have you, so that it makes sense to kind of group them together. So, grab a dozen random bales from this particular lot, and then you're going to want to take a core from it. The best way to do it is to use a hay probe. This is a long metal tube that's got a serrated edge. You can use a brace and bit if you want to work on your biceps, or you can use a power drill if you're lazy. And you're going to bore into the butt end of the bale, that short end of the bale, so that you're getting across multiple flakes. So you'll bore through, pull out the tube, and then empty that into a bucket, and then repeat that with all of the remaining nine to 11 bales that you've taken out. You're going to mix that up, and then put some of that mixed hay in a Ziploc-type bag, and then you're going to send it off to the lab. Most people don't have a hay probe. If you're a hay producer, it's probably a worthwhile investment, but for consumers of it, it may be more money than you want to shell out for it. If you don't have a hay probe, you can still get a pretty good sample just by grabbing a random handful from a flake of hay or two from each of those bales. So you're still going to take out a dozen random bales, you're still going to take a sample from each one. It's just going to be a grab of flakes from each bale, rather than boring through. And ideally, you'd want to cut each bale open so you can reach in; that you're not just getting the stuff on the outside of the bale that might be bleached or more exposed to the sun, or otherwise not giving you an accurate idea of what's inside.
Kendall Kunelius 22:21
And you know, at Extension, we always use the term making a database decision. And sometimes we refer to that more of like the financial sense, but I think it's very applicable in this situation too. So, as someone who's been in the feed and grain industry for 10 years plus; using a hay test to then purchase the more appropriate feed, or the nutritional level feed, or matching that hay test to maybe a nutrient you're missing, and then replacing that with a concentrate. I think there's a lot of really good ways to use a hay test to inform, like you were saying, those different performance levels of animals. And again, as a business person, for me every decision has a number attached. Grain is not cheap, not by any stretch of the imagination. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Or a penny saved is a dollar earned. That kind of idea that if you just spend a little bit of money doing a hay test, maybe you can just get away with feeding that really good quality hay and maybe a loose mineral on the side. And I would definitely say to work with a feed rep, someone who specializes in animal nutrition. I'm thinking of Sarah, Dr. Sarah Allen is our dairy nutritionist. She balances rations and does this stuff all the time. So, there are people out there who are really specialized and highly trained in the area of looking at your hay test and helping you achieve your production and management goals based on that basis of the forage that you're feeding. The other thing I wanted to note about taking those hay tests, too, like we were saying. When I was in college, I interned with my farrier for a summer, and learning about those different - hay can look, it can look bleached and not really high quality. Like when I say, like horse quality, you know what I mean. They can look a little different, but it could still have a high sugar content. And we worked, and my farrier worked specifically on a lot of horses that had laminitis issues, or Cushing's, like those sugar-sensitive horses that we then had to soak the hay to soak some of that carbohydrate and sugar material out. That's a lot of extra handling, so one of the things that we recommended that people could do was ask their hay provider for a hay test first, and then you can decide from there if you actually want to buy bales from that batch of hay. It could go the opposite direction too, right? If you've got a flock of sheep lambing out, but I'm thinking, you know, like animals that really just need access to forage all the time. Their stomachs and their digestive systems are designed to have a lot of forage going through them at all times. So for horses they should be grazing or have access to forage for at least 20 out of 24 hours a day. So you could also find a little bit less nutrient-dense forage with the purpose of having open access to that forage all the time, and that matches the animal's digestive system better than feeding just a little bit of really highly concentrated forage, and then matching it with a mineral or a grain. And that was a long, a long way around to say what are your thoughts on that idea of using that hay testing to inform production?
Carl Majewski 25:12
Yeah, yeah, I mean, absolutely. It's kind of like making sure that you've got rice cakes to snack on instead of chips.
Kendall Kunelius 25:20
Yes! Something air, like fluffy and air and fibrous, yeah.
Carl Majewski 25:24
Right, but I think that's exactly right. A forage test not only tells you what you've got, it's something that - it's a valuable tool to figure out how to feed it, and I do that all the time. So when I've given talks to 4-H groups or others, I've done exactly what you talked about earlier with grain and pointed out: if you were to use a hay that was lower in nutritional value versus like a second cutting that was higher in nutritional value, and then saying all right, we've got a ewe that is nursing twins and these are her nutritional requirements, how does each hay stack up? And in each case, you're going to have to feed some grain, but in one case, with the lower nutritionally dense hay, you're feeding half hay and half grain in their ration. With the other hay, you're feeding 90% hay, and then just maybe a pound or so of grain. And then if you pencil that out, as far as what it costs per pound of hay versus per pound of grain, it's a big price difference in there. And you're absolutely right that some animals just don't have that high nutritional demand, so giving them the hay that's closer to the rice cakes rather than the potato chips.
Rebecca Dube 26:10
Yeah, and Extension offers use of a hay tool for people to borrow. Is that correct? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Carl Majewski 26:54
Some county offices have hay probes. The policy for loaning them out, I don't think it's, I don't think all offices have them, and their policies about loading them out may vary. So, call your county office and find out if that's something that they might be able to help with.
Kendall Kunelius 27:14
Actually, I just used our hay probe the other day. We did hay testing and hay sampling, like the core, like we're talking about Carl, in our equipment and facilities class. I have several equine folks in there who said, like, 'Hey, we.. I know our barn manager asks for hay to get tested, but I want to know how to actually take that sample and send it out." So I thought that was a really, a great thing for a college kid to ask is to be aware enough to say, "Oh, I know we have to get this tested, I just don't know how, can you teach us how?" So every student in the class got to practice taking a core out of a bale. Shout out to Farm Services for letting us come over and take a bunch of samples out of all the horse hay bales! And then we practiced putting it in the bin and sorting through it and packing only enough into the bag that the hay sample sheet asks for. And you know all these are kinds of things that they may seem in theory pretty straightforward, but you kind of have to follow the process in order to get an accurate sample. Thinking about the physiology of the bale itself, like you were saying, Carl; that bale comes from x amount of foot section, depending on if you're packing into a square bale or a round bale, and that's only one strip of hay out of that entire field. So I think I want to underline again the importance of taking a variety of samples from bales that could have been grabbed from around the field. And then I have another question for you, Carl, and this is something I don't know the answer to, but I could take a guess. So if I'm looking at my hay tests and I'm then looking at my soil tests, what information from that collection of data would then tell me how often or what I would need to fertilize the field with, or treat the field with? Because that's another cost that goes into haying that we haven't touched on yet. How would I know when I need to re-fertilize for nutrient value?
Carl Majewski 28:56
Well, as far as like the nutritional value of the hay, I wouldn't really use - Fertilizing, has some influence on it, but I wouldn't use a feed test to determine when to fertilize the hay. Okay. But I would use a soil test. And like all of my Extension brethren, not only here in New Hampshire, but probably across the country, I'd get up on my soapbox, and always tell people to test their soils regularly, once every three years. You want to have a good, vigorous stand of grass. And just like you want a well-fed animal; in order to be able to get the animal performance out of it, you want to have all the nutrients that your grass plants, or whatever forage plants that you've got in that hay field, you want them to have the nutrients that they need, so that that can support good vigorous growth. It's not the only factor that's in there, you know. There's climate, there's soil, there's all of these other things. But you need to have those nutrients there as well. One of the biggest nutrients that will make a difference in terms of your grass yield is nitrogen. Grass uses a lot of nitrogen and uses it well. No other nutrient will give you a response in yield the same way that nitrogen will, so you want to make sure that you don't skimp on that. And if your hay yields have been lacking, it's maybe worth looking to see what your nitrogen is. Also, these days we're paying more and more attention to sulfur. Sulfur and nitrogen are both major constituents of plant protein, so you need to make sure that you have both of them. Plants use a lot less sulfur than they do nitrogen, but it's still a really important nutrient. It used to be that we didn't worry about sulfur because air quality was worse than it is these days, believe it or not. So we used to get a lot of basically air pollution from the industrial parts of the country kind of wafting over this area - all that stuff that used to cause acid rain 40-50 years ago. So that wasn't great, but the one thing that you could say about it is that it was also depositing a lot of sulfur. Now that we don't have those emissions, the air is cleaner, which on the balance is much better for us, but that means that we don't get the sulfur deposition that we used to. So where we didn't used to worry about applying that in a fertilizer, we're finding that we're getting a better response by having some sulfur in the fertilizer rather than just nitrogen alone.
Kendall Kunelius 31:39
Interesting.
Rebecca Dube 31:41
That's what I was gonna say, very interesting!
Kendall Kunelius 31:43
Yeah, I think the other thing that comes to mind, too, thinking about soil testing, and you know, every three years, and thinking about fertilizing, is every time you commit to putting a tractor and or a piece of equipment on that field. I mean, yeah, I'm thinking about soil compaction, but I'm just thinking about the fuel cost, right? Like, if I don't have to fertilize every single year, or if I can use that soil test to determine how often I need to fertilize. The per-bale cost for a field really does matter, because that's going to tell you how much, you know, how much do you want to keep haying that field? Do I need to switch up my equipment to better match the field that's yielding or the type of grass there? I feel like there's a lot of variables, and I'm not going to get so granular here to think about it. But I want to just hop on your soil testing train real quick to say usually it's reasonable to expect to get two cuttings from a field in New Hampshire, as a general rule. Some places you might get lucky and get three, but maybe you'd care to comment on the idea of if we're trying to extend our growing seasons based on the climate change that we're seeing, is there a way that we could look at our soil tests and maybe determine if it's worth putting a little extra fertilizer on, depending on if we're trying to get a little bit more out of our fields?
Carl Majewski 32:57
First of all, I would point out that it's entirely appropriate to get granular over fertilizer!
Kendall Kunelius 33:04
Yes! Okay, for those.. wait, I'm gonna explain. I'm gonna put context for those for those who don't know. Fertilizer typically comes in a granular form, like a pellet or a round thing that you're going to be putting on the field, that's the joke. It was a good one!
Carl Majewski 33:24
I don't know, if it has to be explained, right? So that's kind of like the most niche dad joke ever. Okay. So, fertilizing is one of those things that you do need to do every year. The amount of fertilizer that you put on, or the content of that fertilizer might vary, and so there might be times that you could get away with putting down 100 pounds of a given fertilizer versus 300 or 400 pounds, depending on what the soil test calls for. And absolutely, that's the opportunity to make some substantial savings. But it is something, because just to the way - not to get into the weeds - You keep setting them up and I knock them down! But the way that nitrogen behaves in the soil, it's not something that you can put a whole bunch down in one year and then have that see you through for a couple seasons. Or even at the beginning of the season, and have it see you through for the remainder of the season. It's something that you need to kind of spoon feed, as far as getting the most or stretching out the season. It's probably less a function of fertilizing and more a matter of just timing, to kind of go back to the earlier discussion. So the grass will be ready. You can get first cutting usually sometime around Memorial Day. I mean, it's going to vary with your location around the state. Places in the southern part of New Hampshire, it might be ready before then. The up north, it's going to be maybe a little bit later. But right around Memorial Day, farms would do well to have their equipment ready to go, because it always seems to me like sometime around Memorial Day you do get that one stretch of good sunny weather, and farms that are ready to take advantage of that and take that first cutting early do really well. If you're not ready, and then if it's like mid-June that you're ready, it can still make decent quality hay, it still might be the hay that you know your customers are looking for. But if you've made that delay three weeks, or whatever, two-three weeks, then that's just going to carry through for the rest of the season. If you take your first cutting at the end of May, then you ought to be able to take your second cutting right around the fourth of July. And if you do that, then you could probably take a third cutting sometime as early as maybe mid to late August. Or depending on how the weather goes, you know, maybe the very early part of September. If you're delayed on your first cutting, then that two or three week delay kind of carries through. So it's like mid-June, and then it's maybe mid to late July that you're taking your second cutting. And then, depending on the season, it might be more like mid-September that you- the grass would be ready to mow to take a third cutting. However, by mid-September, your day length is getting short enough, and temperatures are starting to cool down, so that you don't have the same drying conditions that you would have had, say, a month earlier. So it's not that you can't harvest that grass. You could still harvest it as round bales and silage bales, or something like that. But as far as making dry hay, by the time you're getting into mid to late September, it can be a little bit tricky to get it to dry the way that it needs to.
Rebecca Dube 36:57
Hence, the title of our podcast, Making Hay While the Sun Shines!
Carl Majewski 37:02
There you go.
Kendall Kunelius 37:03
Yeah, and you know, you went exactly where I'd hope you were going to go with that question, because the other kind of interesting thing I wanted to comment on that we haven't really seen in the last couple of years, but in years past, where we have had a glut of hay. Thinking about - you've got to make sure those storage areas are cleared out before you're prepping to bring those next set of cuttings in. So thinking about if I only have a couple of hay storage areas on my barn. Whether it's horses, cattle, sheep, whatever, you probably have a designated hay storage area. And you have to make sure that is well and truly cleared out. Hay loses that nutritive value if it's stored over longer periods of time. The term is FIFO, first in, first out. So it's also, I think, a game of making sure that you've got room to rotate that hay through, based on those cuttings coming in. And if you have a really good hay year (which you know we hope always we have a good hay year), I don't think we could possibly make too much hay in New Hampshire that we couldn't find a market to sell it to, or use it up somehow, right? I think hay is one of those steady-stream markets. There's always demand. So, I guess the point I'm trying to make here is to say, yes, we're making hay while the sun shines. Yes, it's about the grass. Yes, it's about having equipment ready to go. I always talk to farmers who are interested in haying, like first and foremost: Where are you going to put it, or what are you going to do with it, when it comes off the field? Are you bringing it right to the end customer's house, the end consumer's place? Maybe you're delivering it right to a horse farm, fresh out of the field. Is someone coming to pick it up out of the field? Are you offering them a discount if they do that part of the labor for you? If you have round bales, how are you going to store those? Are you gonna wrap them and stack them? How are you gonna handle them? Material handling is a big piece of this. Do you have a tractor that, if you're doing a wet round bale that's wrapped? That thing's like what, 1200 pounds, right in there? A dry round bale, maybe 800 to 900 pounds. So that takes a specialized piece of equipment to be able to handle that size item versus a square bale that maybe you know you could stack in the back of a gator or feed out with flakes. So just thinking about the actual logistical piece of haying. I think is just as important as thinking about the nutrient and the treatment of the ground and the soil to get that product into your hands, because you really don't want to go through all that time, effort, labor, that sweat equity to just let the hay rot in the field because you don't have space in the barn to put it or something to feed it to.
Carl Majewski 39:29
I agree. I agree
Kendall Kunelius 39:32
On that note, Carl. Not that I'm a betting woman, but when do you think this year our first cut is going to come off?
Carl Majewski 39:38
If I could make those predictions with any kind of accuracy, I wouldn't have to work for Extension!. I mean, the thing is, that this being New Hampshire, the weather has always been a little bit quirky. There have been times that I mean, in Cheshire County they got a coating of snow on Sunday evening, and it was 75 degrees two days before! So we're due for just a plain normal growing season. So I'd like that, and I'm sure most of the farms out there would like that too, and certainly that's what I hope for. It's always just a little bit of a grab bag that you just can't predict out. You can't predict by the end of the week really what the weather actually is going to be, let alone a month from now. So, what I would hope for is that things continue to warm up more or less on schedule. So we'll get some cool snaps, we'll still probably get plenty of frost, but we'll also get some warmer weather in there. And then it would be great if we get that sunny stretch sometime around the very end of May or early June, when you've got that long day length and just the best drying conditions. Ideally, we wouldn't have had like a week-long deluge of rain, so that you can get the equipment out onto the field; that you can get it without making big ruts or getting equipment stuck. And then if we can avoid constant weeks of rain or drought, that would be great,
Kendall Kunelius 41:16
Wouldn't it?
Carl Majewski 41:17
Wouldn't it? Yeah, right. We always just kind of have to wait and see. But I think part of that, and to maybe just kind of bring things full circle, is that that's where it's important to just be ready. So that when you've got that good stretch of whether you can make hay when the sun is shining out, because there's, you know, unfortunately, there's no guarantee about how the rest of the season is going to go. So taking advantage of those opportunities when you have them becomes - I mean, it's always been the right thing to do. It's always been part of good farming management. It's just that much more important these days.
Kendall Kunelius 41:55
Yeah, agreed. And you know, I'll put a quick plug in here for our ag equipment education program. Part of the big reason why I think it's so important to teach the tractor maintenance classes that we do, is: Is your tractor well maintenanced, and are you paying attention to the condition of your equipment, so that you can take advantage of it? I think that's like the plug I'll put in for that. The oil change, the greasing, the air filters - air filters are really important, especially when you're doing a lot of dusty things, like haying and mowing, that kind of stuff. But if you're interested in learning how to do some very basic maintenance, like in the manual, in your tractor manual kind of maintenance, we do offer those classes. So if you're interested, we can put a link in the show notes. And then the only last thing I want to say is: Carl, I really appreciate your time today, you are like one of our tenured members of Extension, and you are in high demand this time of year, so I just really appreciate you taking time to chat with us and sharing your wisdom.
Carl Majewski 42:46
Well, you're very welcome. I always welcome the opportunity to nerd out on grass and forages and stuff like that. So happy to be here.
Rebecca Dube 42:54
Yes, that was a lot of amazing information from both Carl and Kendall. So, thank you to both of you, and we'll be talking to all of you again soon on the next episode of Shared Soil.
Kendall Kunelius 43:09
Shared Soil is a production of University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, an equal opportunity educator and employer. Views expressed on this podcast are not necessarily those of the University, its trustees, or its volunteers. Inclusion or exclusion of commercial products in this podcast does not imply endorsement. The University of New Hampshire, US Department of Agriculture, and New Hampshire counties cooperate to provide extension programming in the Granite State. Learn more@extension.unh.edu extension.unh.edu
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