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Alan
and Nancy Brown About the farm |
June and Our Annual NOFA Inspection
This is the chilliest first day of June in my recent
recollection. The sun has been in and out all day and luckily it has not rained
a drop. We started our hay baleage on
Saturday. John and Michelle Reid, whose maple syrup we help to distribute, come
to the farm with their 3 tractors, a mowing machine called a diskbine, a round baler that makes bigger
bales than ours and a bale wrapper that seals the hay inside a white plastic
wrap that ferments the hay like sauerkraut and keeps more nutrients in it than
dry hay. We end up making half our hay in baleage,
which looks like great big marshmallows along the edge of the fields and half
in dry big round bales we store in the barn shed at the Waite Farm. That way the cows have a mix
of the two kinds to eat all winter and seem generally healthier and happier
looking than all dry hay years. The baleage
just seems more luscious and they come running when you open up a bale to carry
it out to the fields in the winter. So with their snazzy new tractors and fancy
equipment, they make half our hay in 4 days!! There is no waiting and drying
for this type of hay and you can mow it down, rake in into windrows and bale it
and wrap it all in one day. They are doing 7 fields in the time it takes us to
do 2!! Weather permitting! There are also 3 people operating all at once in circles around the fields, they just need
a small head start on each other and it's amazing how fast it all goes. The
quickness is a real boon to the cows too who get to eat in these fields the
rest of the year. When our haying would take a month between rainstorms and
other activities, these fields had to be limits until all finished. Only then
could the cows go in and eat all around the edges where the tractors do not reach.
Once the field was finished it could go back into the rotational path they
follow all summer. More paddocks of eating means each one has a longer recovery
and re-growth period to be lush again.
In the midst of all this activity, the NOFA-NY inspector for our organic
certification came today to visit, look around, and check up on our activities
and record keeping compliance. Dave was from