Back to Reality: Haying Time

At right: Our pasture timothy is down and curing. Picture me out here on the weekend, hoisting bales of hay.

I came home from my mini-vacation to face one of summer's realities: haying time. That's been a June-July fact of life for me ever since I was a little girl.

While the town kids rode their bikes around town (on pavement...lucky them!), the brothers and I would be running the hay rake, bucking bales, and filling up the hayloft for the upcoming winter. While the town kids cooled off in the public swimming pool, we sweated from our labors and fought the itch of hay dust.

Although the equipment is considerably more sophisticated, haying time is still about sweat and itch. Ordinarily, we have our hay delivered by a grower, and then muscle it into the barn ourselves. But this year, we're adding something new to the stockpile-hay chore, by cutting and baling the timothy produced by our horse pasture.

In the past, it didn't make economic sense for us to do this. Local hay was cheap and easy to obtain, whereas the cost of buying or renting hay-making machinery was high. But now things are different. The hay we purchased last year for $140 a ton (up from $75 a ton in the late '90s) is going to cost $250 a ton. The difference more than pays for the cost of cutting and baling our 10 acres of pasture grass. Every ton of our own timothy that goes into the barn is a ton we won't have to buy.

We will, of course, pay another kind of price--the one of the sweat and itch!