The shape of things to come?

Vis-à-vis the farm part of Farmdoc, a recurring theme in this blog is hay. In the nine years my sharefarmer Sharon and I’ve been jointly farming our adjoining properties, we’ve used square hay bales [1]. (They’re actually rectangular but called square.) This is because they’re smaller and lighter than round bales – the hay in a round bale’s roughly the same as in 15 square bales – so we can handle them manually. (Lifting round bales needs machinery – which Joel Salatin derides as ‘heavy metal’ [2] – which we don’t have and don’t want.) As neither Sharon nor I is getting younger (and stronger), we’re seeking ways to make our farming easier. So we decided we’d experiment this year. Last Saturday we bought a round bale (pictured) (for A$50) which we rolled off Sharon’s ute into one of our paddocks where we have 36 sheep and 29 goats. Instead of feeding square bale hay to them daily, the round bale’s now available to them, buffet-like, 24/7. How quickly they’ll eat it, and whether it’ll be degraded by the weather or them climbing and then excreting on it, remains to be seen. But if you don’t ask the question you won’t know the answer. This aspect of farming’s fun. It intrigues me. Stay tuned.

farmdoc's blog post number 261

Last Saturday, Sweetheart Vivienne blogged about last Friday’s hay carting. And yesterday I did the same. I knew we’d write about the same topic in different ways. For a start, she’s a Writer and I’m just someone who writes. Or tries to. Sweetheart Vivienne’s post doesn’t contain even one number. But my post’s dotted – or littered, depending on your viewpoint – with them: counts, times and durations. This partly reflects my aim of diarising this year’s hay carting, so next year we’ll have a record of this year’s to consult. And it partly reflects the way I see the world; or at least my world. Obviously I see my world the way I do, because I’m me. And this incorporates my age and gender. Last week Sweetheart Vivienne and I were having a discussion with our darling fourth daughter, and I continually brought up the practical, ‘nuts-and-bolts’ consequences of various courses of action. My doing so irritated said daughter. Sweetheart Vivienne explained it with the epithet ‘That’s such a Dad thing’. I don’t know if all dads think the way I do. How they think is not my problem; but how I think is. Anyway, enough of this. I’m now going to click on the Tasmanian Library Service website and order Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.

farmdoc's blog post number 260

For me, the word chore has a negative connotation. But on reflection I see no reason why chores shouldn’t be enjoyable. On our farm, as likely on all farms, chores are cyclical – daily, weekly, seasonal, annual. And of the annual chores, the two lengthiest and physically hardest are shearing our ewes, and carting in hay bales and stacking them in our hayshed. Both happen in December/January. This season our 39 breeding ewes were shorn on 21 December; and the hay carting was last Friday. We were a five-person hay team. On each load we had 28 bales on Sharon’s ute towing 24 on our trailer. And our four loads totalled 208 bales. With several kilometres between the paddock of the farmer we bought the hay from, and our hayshed, each round trip took about 80 minutes. We began at 2:20 p.m., and ended at 7:45 p.m., i.e. thankfully well before last light at 9:25 p.m.. We even had soft drink and biscuits half way through. The team worked beautifully together: harmoniously, cooperatively, good-humouredly. It couldn’t have gone better. Afterwards Sharon treated us to dinner. On Saturday morning I had a few aches, but nothing major. So now our hayshed is full, ahead of starting to feed the hay out in May. And it’s almost a year until we shear our ewes next December.