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.

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).  

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.  

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