Final haying

We've finished the primary haying for the year; picked and stacked 21 tons of hay.  That's up from the 14 tons we put away last year.  We're carrying a few more animals, but mostly the price was good and what we don't feed can be used as bedding, even next year.  Here's a stack of 300 bales.  We ended up with 700 bales, about 60lbs each.   Maybe a few more than that.  Enough to fill 2/3rds of the hay barn.   

I put up more bales this year because I'm able to sell them for $5-6/each in the winter.  Horse folks seem to forget that their horses eat all year long, and as a result there's always a demand for relatively cheap hay, and local grass hay at $5 a bale is just the ticket.  Stacked in my barn, including labor costs and allowance for breakage and spoilage, they cost me $2.38/bale.  So if I sell half it pays for the other half.    I'm betting on horse people doing what they always do.  Been a safe bet so far. 

My hay guy has had problems with his baler this year; so we had more breakage than usual.  Here's an example of a bale that isn't correctly baled.  So I talked to him, and the bales we didn't take we cut the strings on, and he re-raked and re baled it, so he get some use of out of it. 

Here's my new hay hauler.  It's a 2000 ford F450, an ex-utility truck. I think that this one was the power companies.  It has 60,000 miles on it and cost $8,000 at the auction.  Works pretty well, put it to work the day after I bought it.  Comes with a hydraulic crane on the back and the bed is all-aluminum, so it won't rust and doesn't weigh much -- more payload.  We stack that trailer 6 high before we're done. 

And there was a whole lot of work to be done!