I've read countless articles written by
farm advisors and college professors on how to determine if you should
raise your own hay or purchase it. Usually these include a formula or
Internet calculator where you plug in all sorts of numbers like
depreciation, variable costs, yearly housing costs for equipment, blah
blah blah. I'm here to tell you there's only one equation you need to
remember: If (a) = the cost of one bale you grow yourself and (b) = the
cost of each bale you buy, (a) – (b) = … ARE YOU CRAZY? UNDER NO
CONDITIONS SHOULD YOU EVER GROW YOUR OWN HAY!
I
reached this conclusion after just two experiences in growing hay. The
first was when I was in high school and I got a job hauling hay for a
ranch that grew their own. There were four of us, three crazy teenagers
and the old sage manager who drove the truck which was, I think, one of
the first ever built. The truck had a lot in common with the oat hay
because both were extremely rusty. We spent many an hour watching the
manager patch things together with excess baling wire, which we had
plenty of thanks to the antique McCormick baler that enthusiastically
mangled the stuff.
Prior to picking up
bales in the field we had to kick them over so they'd lie flat. It
sounds simple enough but when you kicked over each bale you didn't know
if a jackrabbit or squirrel would dart out giving you a heart attack, or
a rattlesnake would be coiled underneath.
To
load the hay we bolted an old elevator to the frame of the truck. The
purpose of this elevator was to pick up the small bales that weighed
about 300 POUNDS (just kidding, but not by much) and delivered the bales
to the side of the truck bed where one of us kids would grab the bale
and stack it. What made this interesting was you'd yank on the bale with
your hay hook to remove it from the elevator but half the time the wire
would break and you'd fall backwards. This was okay when you were on
layer #1 but not when you were balancing atop layer #7. I don't know how
we kept from breaking our young necks.
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