The Science of Making High Quality Haylage

written by

John Masser

posted on

October 12, 2023

I’m sure by now you’ve heard our cattle are 100% grass-fed. This means that we have to make sure they always have some kind of grass ready for them to eat at all months of the year. The cattle eat only forages over the summer, but over the winter when the pastures go dormant, we have to feed hay.

We only feed hay that we bale on our farm. This way, we know exactly what we are feeding all the time. Although we do have a couple of perennial hay fields, most of what we bale is multispecies cover crops planted after we harvest wheat in early July. These cover crops consist of many species, including sudangrass, oats, winter peas, sweet clover, red clover, wheat, rye, triticale, sunflowers, hairy vetch, buckwheat, radish, turnip, kale, and mustard.

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This cover crop serves two purposes. Not only do we use it for feed, but they also help to build soil fertility. By keeping a living root in the ground, it enhances the environment for the microbiology in the soil, (but that’s a story for another time).

Although it may be surprising, there's a lot of science that goes into making sure our cows are eating nothing but the best when it starts to snow.

The science starts with the baler. The hay must have the proper moisture percentage before we can begin to bale it. Too wet and the bales will grow mold and rot, too dry and the bales will not ferment and turn into haylage properly (which we'll learn about later)😉.

Once the bales are collected we take them to our staging area and lay them out in straight rows. Later in the evening, the bale wrapper comes in and wraps the bales in white plastic (The plastic is like extra thick plastic wrap that most people have in their kitchens at home).  

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By wrapping them in a plastic tube, it creates an air-tight seal. This oxygen-free environment helps to kickstart the fermentation process. The carbohydrates (sugars) in the leaves of the plants ferment and lower the pH of the hay. The lower the pH level, the less of a chance there is of the tube growing harmful bacteria and spoiling.

Now you might be asking yourself "Why would they do it this way, I see other farmers who just stack their hay in a barn and it is perfectly fine"?

When you make “dry” unfermented hay, you must make sure the crop is below a certain moisture percentage before baleing it. If it’s too wet it may catch fire inside the barn! (This happens because the moisture allows for bacteria to grow. After the population of bacteria reaches a certain size, the hay begins to heat up because of the life inside of it. As it does this, it creates large amounts of heat and in the aerobic environment of a barn, the oxygen helps to create a fire. The results are typically devastating. 

We make hay in the fall and the spring, when the weather is usually cool and moist because that is when our cover crops are at peak maturity and is the best time to harvest them. This makes it hard to get the hay down to the safe moisture percentage before baling. Making it into baleage allows us to bale it a day or two sooner, rather than waiting for it to dry completely, allowing us to make hay in tighter weather windows between the rains.  

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There is another reason why we make haylage which is even more scientific🧑🏻‍🔬! 

Fermented hay, or baleage, has a much higher nutritional content than your typical "dry" hay bale and puts the forage in a form that is more easily digested by the cattle. Cattle and other ruminant animals, such as sheep, deer, and buffalo, have a four-chambered stomach which allows them to digest grass. The rumen is the largest of the four chambers and acts as a large fermentation tank. There are many different kinds of bacteria in the rumen that break down the grass fibers and give the cattle the nutrition they need. By partially fermenting the hay before it is fed to the cattle, it helps speed up the process of digestion in the rumen, allowing the cattle to eat more feed. This not only helps our rate of gain (how fast an animal grows to its market weight), but it also helps to ensure the meat stays packed full of the vitamins and minerals that make our beef different.


I trust you are all experts now on the process of making haylage! Although you may not be ready to get your own herd of beef cattle quite yet, you can check out our full list of products here and make sure you are feeding your family REAL food this winter!

John Masser

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From field to barn! How we harvest potatoes at Red Hill Harvest!

This week on the farm, potato harvest was all we had on our minds! The weather has been a challenge during this year's harvest, from being too dry early in the season to 10 days of rain in late September, but hey, that’s farming. This week's goal is to get as many of the remaining potatoes out of the ground and back into the storage. Here’s how we do it! Step 1: Prep fields for harvest -  Before a field of potatoes is harvested, the tops of the potato plants must be killed. This tells the potatoes to put all their energy into growing thicker skin instead of growing in size. We terminate the potatoes 2-5 weeks before harvest, depending on the variety. (Some varieties take longer for the skins to set.) In a non-organic system, potatoes are terminated using a chemical desiccant. This is a very effective way to get the potato vines to die and leave the field ready for harvest. 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We chose this smaller machine because it matched well with the destoning system we use in the spring. To briefly explain the long process of planting, we make a bed of soil, use a destoning machine to pull the rocks from the bed and lay the stones into the tire tracks, and finally, we plant two rows of potatoes in the rock-free bed. Using this system, we can limit the damage caused by handling potatoes and rocks together. Here’s how the harvester works… First, the potatoes are dug out of the ground and transferred onto a slatted conveyor belt. This conveyor is the first separation method, removing all the loose dirt and small rocks. The remaining material continues up the belt and onto the main separation table.  This table has a series of counter-rotating shafts that grab onto vines, mud clumps, rocks, and other foreign materials and pull them down below and back into the field. From there, the potatoes go to another conveyor, where we have two people standing to remove all of the foreign material that the harvester missed. At this point, it is crucial to get all of the rocks that the destoner missed out of the potatoes because the next stop is the truck! The potatoes ride up the conveyor and into the truck, which drives alongside the harvester. Once the truck is full, it returns to the shed, where it gets unloaded! Step 3: Unload - When the truck returns to the shed, we back it up to our ELIMINATOR…  Dun, Dun, Dunn! Ok, maybe it's not that scary! The potatoes unload from the truck and ride up yet another conveyor, which dumps onto a star separation table. The table allows any soil that may have passed the harvester to be removed from the potatoes. Then, the spuds get one final hand grade. Removing all of the material before the potatoes head into storage is important. After the final grade, the small potatoes are removed. These potatoes are not desirable for making french fries and do not look nice in a package with bigger potatoes, so we remove them and pack them separately. Once sizing is complete, there are only two more conveyors before they reach the bins! We use an automatic bin filler, which uses sensors to fill each bin to its optimal level. After the bins are filled, they’re off to the cooler! Step 4: Storage - Most potatoes in the United States are stored in bulk, which means they are stored in one big pile. We choose to use the bin method for variety separation and quality.  The first reason is simple: we grow over ten varieties of potatoes on our farm. It is much easier to keep them separate in bins rather than piles.  Most importantly, though, we use bins to keep the quality of our potatoes high. With varying field conditions, potatoes in one area of the field may be more prone to rot. Rot will spread like a disease in storage if not properly addressed. 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