There's More To Making Hay Than You Know!

It's beginning to feel like Fall around the dairy farm. The mornings are cool and the afternoons are toasty warm. I've noticed a few leaves beginning to fall and a couple trees to turn a yellowish-orange color. Boy do I love Fall!
It's also one of the busiest times of the year for us here at the dairy. We planted our crops in the Spring and now it's harvest time. We have been working on chopping and baling hay. The first process is to mow, or cut, the hay. We use two mowers to do this-it is just quicker for us. This time of the year, the faster you can cut, or mow it, the faster it will have time to dry.

We then rake one row, or in our case "invert" (flip) it, onto another row so there is more hay for the Chopper to pick up.

This is the "Inverter"

The hay that we chop is called hay silage, or "haylage".

It is dumped from the trucks in a pile and then is pushed up and onto a pile on the ground-on a cement pad. We have three different locations where we store haylage and corn silage. This is a smaller area:

Thanks for seeing how we chop hay for good quality forage for our cows. To produce milk, the cows need good food, and this is just one example of how it's done!

Next, we'll be looking at chopping corn for corn silage, so check back again to see some exciting videos on that.

Until next time,

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