The Small Farm Future Blog

Making hay while the rain pours…

Posted on July 8, 2013 | No Comments

We’ve got a fair bit of grass on our holding which we haven’t been using to its full potential by grazing it – partly because it’s hard enough to find the time to grow vegetables, let alone looking after livestock, and partly because it’s hard to look after livestock when…(yes, I know I sound like a broken record) we don’t live on the site (more on our planning appeal soon…the date is now set for 20 August).

But we want to make amends by getting some ruminants on the grass (grass grows so well here in Somerset that I sometimes think I should give up on the veg and just become a stockman), and indeed getting them in amongst our trees too to experiment with that good old fashioned technique of wood pasturing. This year we got hold of three bum lambs, bottle fed them and they’re now out snacking happily on the pasture, even though they’re a bit dwarfed by it…still, every journey starts with one step, as they say.

One tricky issue for the small-scale farmer with ruminants is hay/silage. To do it mechanically with a tractor you need a proper drum mower (and not the cheap and cheerful pasture topper that I’ve got), a hay bob and a baler – quite a lot of expensive kit, even if you buy it second-hand. You can get contractors in to do it, but they’re not usually interested in small acreages and since haymaking is so weather dependent it’s very easy to get let down. Or you can do it by hand, with nothing more than a scythe, a pitchfork and a barrow.

Just as an experiment, a couple of weeks ago I took the latter route. I spent a couple of hours cutting maybe 300m² with my Austrian scythe from the excellent scythe shop (results of another recent scientific experiment of mine: it’s quicker to cut a red clover ley with a scythe than a strimmer…though it works up more of a sweat…and I’m not sure the same would be true of rough pasture grass). Then I let it lie for a few days, fluffing it around regularly with the pitchfork until it was really dry, and then barrowed it loose into the shed. Call me a retro-romantic reactionary if you like, but there are things in farming that just feel elemental and somehow right, and making hay is one of them. Actually, I think it’s a bit sad not to be romantic about this – why not feel a sense of connection with things that our ancestors did and that paved the way for our lives today?

One thing I did that wasn’t really an option for our ancestors, however, was raking the hay up one night and covering it with a plastic tarp when the Met Office forecast an evening of heavy rain in between several days of blameless blue sky. In fact, it’s not really an option in the present either for anyone making hay on any significant scale. But it worked a treat for me – shaking the rainwater off the tarp and spreading the dry hay underneath out again to parch for another day or so. Just one more reason why small scale works best…

Of course, doing it the way I did has only given me enough hay to feed a few sheep for a few days, so it’s hardly a solution to the general problem of haymaking for the small farmer, though I could easily have done a fair bit more in the same way. Then again, maybe in a real ‘small farm future’ this will be the right kind of scale – just a bit of grass and a few ruminants alongside the cropped area, the garden and the woodland, a bit of scything, some hay in the shed…oh, and a plastic tarp.

There are lots of interesting ecological issues about livestock, of course, which are excellently discussed in Simon Fairlie’s Meat and have just been given a fresh airing in George Monbiot’s new book Feral. But I’ll come back to those another time. Right now, I’m just happy that I’ve got some dry hay in.