The Hay, The Barn and The MF...

It's been a while since I made a blog entry - we've been pretty busy on the Jamison Family Farm over the past several months...

The Hay...  Last year we were plagued by rain and in many respects this year we experienced the same - but different.  Last year, we got very good cuttings of what we could cut, but rain caused delays in other fields over a period of weeks causing us to bush hog some of those fields rather than harvest.    In 2018 we also wrestled with equipment breakdowns which hampered our haying efforts.  We struggled mightily with our dome shelters and their vinyl covered roofs.

In contrast, this year, we were able to cut all of our fields, but rain and the threat of rain presented some challenges and delays; we had excellent service out of our equipment.  Our fertilizer timing in conjunction with grass maturity and potential rain all clicked.  We applied less fertilizer, yet harvested more hay per acre than in any previous year.  As a result, our first cut yield is up 25% over all of our haying last year.  Our herbicide application and timing were very good too.  While we are seeing more and more orchard grass and fescue come into our timothy fields, I feel we have the weed situation under good control and are trying a new to us herbicide to control foxtail.

For 2019, we are mashing our fields for a second and maybe a third cutting - something we really haven't done in the past.  We have sprayed for broadleaf weeds, foxtail and have fertilized for these upcoming cuttings.  I am hopeful we can begin a second cutting around the 15th of August and perhaps a third around September 15th - we'll see...

Below are a few pics of our haying efforts.

Not all of our hay is nice and green...  We kind of think it's nice hay - but some of it is a bit tan.  On our lower field cutting, we had rain the day after we cut.  We quickly tedded out the hay several times to get it dry.  We were further delayed in baling by the threat of rain for several more days than we would have preferred.  We would be positioned to bale, only see dark clouds to appear, to hear thunderstorms nearby and literally smell water in the air.  It's better to have the hay see rain in the windrow than to get bales soaked, so we would pass on baling and did so for several days.  Ironically - each evening we attempted to bale and called it off due the threat of rain - yet it never rained on the farm.  Driving up and down the road to the farm, we would see where it had rained, sometimes very hard and only a few miles away.  The net effect of our delayed baling on the lower field was hay that was exposed to the sun for several days and with it some fading.

However...  We don't rely on just color, touch and feel (though important).  We sample all of our hay cuttings and sampled the lower field in two halves.  We have four fields and submitted five samples of hay to Equi-Analytical for analysis.  We use their wet chemistry Trainer 603 test, all of which are back and again our hay is low in sugar (ESC+starch), potassium and iron.  Testing in not inexpensive; the Trainer 603 test cost's $67.00 each (including the $2.00 postage fee).  For our first cuttings, we spent $335.00 so we can show our buyer exactly what they are getting.  I don't personally know of any other hay producer near us doing the same.  Yes - color, touch and feel, absence of weeds, tight bales are very important considerations for one's hay, but we think First Quality Hay demands a food label and we provide it.  If you'd like a copy of our hay test results, send us an email at [email protected]

Above are core samples being taken and May the Hay Dog keeps things honest by taste testing our hay - when she can find it...

The Barn... I think I've mentioned before that my kids are 5th generation on the Jamison Family Farm.  My great grandfather, James Henry Jamison, built the barn that has seen use for over 100 years.  My grandfather, George Lewis Jamison, made sure the fields were well fertilized and often the old barn was full to the top with square bales of hay.

​In James Henry's day, loose hay ruled.  He built the original barn for horses, storage of loose hay and in the back was a manger for feeding cattle or sheep.  The beams in the barn are held together with wooden dow pins.  It originally had a wood shingle roof.  That was replaced during World War II and my Dad helped with the replacement.  Due to the material needs of the war, steel roofing was not available, so tin was used.  The old barn always had a shinny roof.  I recall my Dad telling me that it was fall when they replaced the roof and he was on top of the barn working.  Directly ahead - across the road on the farm is Linton's Ridge.  It is a wonderful and plentiful place to squirrel hunt.  My Dad recalled that while he was helping with the roof - where he really wanted to be was on Linton's Ridge squirrel hunting.  Sometimes my boys or my brother will kill a few squirrels and my mother will make a tasty squirrel pot pie!

While the old barn served the farm extremely well, over the years it has been wearing and breaking down.  The roof is coming loose; tin ripping away in the wind, roof supports with holes from bumble bees that bore into the wood, overloading the barn - designed for loose hay, yet packed with squares for over 50 years took their toll.  Strong winds have caused damage and believe it or not, ground hogs digging under the barn have damaged the underpinnings of the barn causing it to sag in critical areas.  Below are some recent pictures of the barn.​..

As bad as the barn looks, some of it is still useable.  Last year we filled every nook and cranny that was available for hay and if needed could still store some hay in the old barn.  But this barn was built in a different time and as great as it is/was, it is not tractor/implement friendly for today's haying.  All hay stored in the barn had to be carried inside for stacking; a tractor or wagon could not fit under it.  If rain was coming, unloading was a real fire drill to get the hay off the wagons and into the barn and haying wasn't finished until ALL hay was unloaded and in the barn.  Sometimes we were close to midnight getting hay off the wagons and stored.  Bottom line - it was time to either rebuild the old barn or build a new one.  Given our haying needs, I felt a new barn - one designed for haying that fits what we are doing in 2019 (and beyond) was a better option.

Below are a few more pictures of the old barn.  One is a picture of hay neatly stacked in the barn, another is with myself and Iva stacking some hay and finally my lush barn office...

So with the decision made to build a new barn, a few thoughts permeated my head.  To start with - this would be the first and last barn I'd ever build; it had to be a home run.  This barn had to meet our haying needs - to include features that made it easier to work around our day job hours.  It had to be built to a different standard - one that would help preserve and sell First Quality Hay.

The New Barn...

While this is a pole barn, it is not the ordinary pole barn one might see or use for hay.  It is designed with three doors, one on each end and one on the side.  The doors are 16 feet wide and 16 feet tall; they will have sliding doors covering the openings.  The two end doors enable drive through and the barn is wide enough to turn in/out the side if necessary.  This barn is 32 feet wide x 88 feet long with a clear span 16 foot interior height.  It has two foot roof over hangs on each side and one foot overhangs on the ends.  There are gutters along each long side to divert water away from the building.

Most pole barns have metal roofing, so does ours, however, metal roofs are notorious for raining condensation onto the hay below.  Sometimes a bubble or felt insulation is used to minimize this, but over time it generally fails to stick and peels off the underside.  Our barn uses plywood under the metal roofing (with a felt barrier between) to provide additional strength to the roof, but also to serve as insulation - preventing condensation.

A barn needs to breathe as hay sweats and continues to dry down after baling and air movement is critical.  The two foot over hangs on each side of the barn are vented; the roof has a ridge vent too.  There is a lot of air movement in this barn; even when we have the doors in place, this barn will breathe nicely.

​It's handy to have some natural light in the barn, so we designed-in clear polycarbonate panels under the eave's of each side of the barn.  We want light, but not to much as it discolors the hay.  We opted for continuous light panels down each side of the barn, but limited their height to limit to much light from entering the barn.

The pic below shows those light panels from the inside...

As I mentioned, the doors on this barn are 16 feet wide x 16 feet tall.  The idea with these large doors was multiple.  One of them was to have a barn door opening large enough to allow a tractor trailer to back-into for a load of hay.  More importantly though, was a need to get hay baled, quickly into the barn and out of the weather for unloading later.  These doors are large enough that until the middle of the barn fills-up with hay, we can pull our wagons right under it.  This is a huge help when you are haying around a full time day job and/or just trying to beat the rain.  Remember the old barn - everything had to be unloaded - regardless.  The new barn:  We park the wagons under it and unload later - when it's cooler, when it's raining or another day.  There are no fire drills with this barn...

We wanted a barn large enough to hold all of our present hay yield and future increased yields - as we continue to take back old pastures and convert them into hay fields.  We actively manage our fields from depleted old pastures, lacking in just about everything, to strong hay producing acreage.  On our first cuttings this year, we had one field that yielded 150 bales per acre.  In contrast, a typical, wore-out/depleted field without any inputs on this farm, might make 40 bales per acre per year.  So with the increased acreage and increased bales per acre, storage capacity is important.  If we stack hay to the bottom of the trusses, we can put just over 6,000 bales of hay in this barn.  It is unlikely we will ever get that many bales of hay in this barn at once - though anything is possible.  Hay inventory ebbs and flows as we make our cuttings.  We have already sold a fair amount of our first cuttings and are a couple weeks away from our second cuttings.  Our short term goal is at least 5,000 bales per year (all cuttings) and that goal will be achieved in a few years.  It's good to know we have a barn capable of holding that much hay.  We no longer need our other sheds/shelters to store hay and the headaches (read loss of hay) that went with them.

Color...  We wrestled with what color this barn should be.  Seems simple enough, but we spent a lot of time over the winter considering the look of the barn.  As you can imagine, I've got this slickery website with nice pictures and when customers would pull into the farm, our shelters visually left something to be desired - to say the least.  Ever look online at beach hotels only to book one based on how nice it looked in the pictures, but when you got there - maybe the hotel looked that good on one side, one time in the past, but in person - it was a dump?  I kind of thought our old shelters, especially our dome shelters - while functional, did not convey a warm and fuzzy with respect to First Quality Hay...

This new barn needed to look great AND sell hay...

I thought I wanted a red barn with a silver or white roof - a traditional looking barn.  We drove around looking at barns of every color, looked on the internet at pictures and you may not believe it - agonized over the color scheme.  This is the first and last barn I'll ever build - it has to be right, down to the barn colors.  We were 99% sure we were going red until we drove out from Sweet Springs West Virginia to Union.  Along the drive we saw red barns, white barns, beige barns - some wooden barns that had never seen paint.  What we did see was a few nice white barns with green roofs.  Mindful the farm house is white with a green roof - at the last minute we decided to go with white sides, green roof and but added green wainscoting around the bottom.  I'm a little biased, but against the mountain backdrop, I think our the barn color choice looks pretty good.

Good enough to show the same barn picture from above - again...

I can ramble more about this barn - ask me when you come for a visit or a load of hay...

The MF...  Over the years we have upgraded our equipment and the machines we use to cut our hay has evolved from a simple sickle mower to a sickle mower conditioner to a disc mower conditioner.  If the sickle mower required 25 horsepower and the sickle mower conditioner required maybe 40 horse power, our disc mower conditioner (to realize it's fullest potential) requires 70 horse power minimum and in heavy hay, at a good clip, even more power.  We also wanted a very heavy tractor such that when we have a loaded hay wagon, we can safely bring it down from the "hill" without being pushed to the bottom.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we searched all winter for another tractor and settled on a Massey Ferguson 1105.

This tractor has a 110 PTO horse power and weighs in at close to 15,000 lbs.  It handles our mower conditioner like a dream.  At 7 mph (our sickle mower conditioner on a good day made about 3.5 mph) and in heavy hay, I can mow four acres in one hour.  The tractor mower combo makes it possible for me to arrive at the farm and mow late in the evening, into the dew and/or dark.  The disc mower conditioner will not clog the cutter bar like our other sickle machines in dew damp hay or tangled lodged hay and plows right through everything leaving a golf course cut.  MF has the power to run it as fast as I can stay in the seat and loaded hay wagons do not push this tractor around.

​The Massey Ferguson 1105 is a welcome addition.

A few more pics...

As I'm writing, it's getting late; about 2 am.  I think this is the longest blog I've written yet.  May the Hay Dog thinks it's a bit much and would like me to knock it off for the night...

Hope everyone has a great Summer.  If you are in need of good hay, additional info on our hay or have questions - send us a note to [email protected]

Disclaimer:  This blog entry and all others are checked and edited by May the Hay Dog... woof!