First Field Mowed

Even with all the hullabaloo of the main herd, herd sire and general upheaval of switching gears (hay metaphor) to harvesting the hay crop we did get the first step completed, the far, far field has been mowed down.

I did have the question asked why I call it the far, far field and wanted to clear up the confusion. Our farm has the river running through it, although as meandering streams tend to do and what is natural, the river does not run in a straight line through the farm. The farm begins with the river coming onto the place, then the river circles around and snakes off only to turn yet again and come back onto the property to run to the other end and on toward the ocean. The far, far field is actually across the river two times from the house. We have to drive up the county road and in a small neck in order to access this field and the surrounding pasture land with timber areas.

Now that the far, far field has been mowed flat we can judge about how much hay we will get off this field. The really warm weather we had in early spring dried out this field way too early for the grass to get a good growth spurt after taking the main herd out of grazing rotation.

It is hard to tell where the rows of the drying grass is since it is so thin and patchy. We expect that the harvest off this field will be less than half of what we harvested last year.

It is a good thing that we still have quite a bit of stored hay left over from last year because it looks like a lean harvest all the way around.