Better than expected

We got our first crop of hay put up in record time. That is not typical, thanks to breakdowns and weather. It’s not that we don’t maintain our equipment. I have a whole file cabinet drawer in the shop, full of invoices from the local equipment dealers to prove that. It’s just that we run old equipment, and old equipment gets tired and often has to take a nap at inopportune times. I can usually relate with our tired equipment by the end of hay season.

My sons, Erik and Jonnie, have been helping a lot the last couple seasons with getting equipment ready for the year. They started with simple tasks like washing the tractors years ago, and I can now give them a grease gun, point them at an implement and be reasonably sure no zerks were missed. It took us a week of prep to get everything ready to chop, roll, lift, pack, etc. for the season, which wasn’t bad. An unexpected broken frame discovered when changing knives on the discbine required dropping the cutterbar and some welding. That added a half day to getting ready, but it went well, and the repair held up over 150+ acres, which was surprising. My upside-down welding in tight area skills are not the best. Jonnie got to learn how to replace the shear bar and adjust knives in the New Holland chopper this year with me. He isn’t a fan of how tedious that job is either, but we got it done.

The weather was excellent for getting hay put up. Other than a constant haze of smoke from Canada, there were only a couple days of drizzle to slow us down. Last year, it seemed like, every time we’d just get started chopping, a rain would come through and put us off until the next day. We were joking that the hay will be smoke-cured like the sausages we like so much, and we hoped that the cows would appreciate the taste this winter.

I haven’t taken any forage samples yet, but I think the quality will be great. We cut when the bulk tank weights were at their peak of spring flush milk production. A couple days after we finished hay, the weights of milk we were shipping started to go down as the pastures have peaked in their quality and are headed downward with the flowering of the grasses. In late June to July, the quality of the pastures goes back up, but then the heat and flies lower production by making the cows uncomfortable. I’ll just have to fondly remember last week’s production numbers until fall, when we calve in a bunch of cows, the fall weather is comfortable and we start feeding all this high-quality hay we put up. That’s usually the second-best time of the year for us, milk production-wise.

What will we do with all this time we have, now that we are done putting up hay for 20 days or so? Catch up on cattle care activities is what we’ve been doing so far. We moved some more heifers to the summer pasture by New Prague to hang out with our new Angus breeding bull named Ricky. Then, we brought some more beef steers to a pasture we are renting by Cannon Falls because the grass was doing well enough to add a few more head there. The individual calf huts are full, so we need to shuffle calves next to make space for the 10 more babies that should be born before July. Also, Emily and our employees would like to have all the calves on group feeders. It’s a lot less work, and the calves like having friends to bounce with.

Until next time, keep living the dream, and I hope your hay season goes as well as this cutting did for us. Here’s hoping for timely rains and ample sun so we’ll be back out there cutting again July 1.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.