Drum Roll Please

For all of you who were playing along with our riddle of the hay harvest, thank you for all your guesses, tips, queries, well wishes, quips and astounding support! I am in awe of my wonderful readers and I count on all of you…Now on with the awards!

The actual total of the last third of our amazingly trying field came to 779 bales. Mike had penned his estimate as 800 (since he mowed, raked and baled most of it he definitely had a good feeling about his guess).

Prize #1 Congratulations to  Cathy C-L to being the closest to Mike’s number at 826 bales.

Prize #2 Congratulations to Bonnie coming in the closest to the actual number.

Prize #3 And we have a special Congratulations to Baker who not only did a lot of math to come up with a total but showed the work in an email! This is an excerpt from the letter:

My best guess (because I am an optimist) is 1239 bales

I think Mike would be a bit less optimistic (more realistic) and guess 1033 bales

If I only get one guess, my guess is 1239 bales, because I am an optimist!

Here is how I did my calculations. The second cut was 2.3 better than the first. Optimistically, you would get yet another 50% growth which would yield 3.47 times better yield than the first cut (1239 bales). Realistically you would get 25% growth over the second cut which would be 2.89 times the first cut’s yield (1033 bales)

Field	Acres	Bales	B/Acre
first	3	153	51		50%	25%
second	5	590	118	2.313725	3.470588	2.892157
last (optimistic)	7	1239	177
last (realistic)	7	1033	147.5

Talk about blown away! Very cool to see a great mind at work, I just wish the elk that kept coming in to graze their way through the field paid attention to how much we were looking forward to a good yield.

Thank you to all that participated and I will be contacting the winners to see what kinds of goodies they will be wanting!