Caden Patterson tests the moisture level of a freshly steamed bale during third cutting last summer.

Kiowa County, Kansas, contains 1,800 people, three incorporated communities, and one traffic signal. That stoplight hangs over Main Street in the town of Greensburg, which is home to the county’s lone high school and the world’s largest hand-dug well.

You might not be able to tell that Greensburg was decimated by an EF5 tornado less than two decades ago. The devastating storm virtually leveled the town, leaving hundreds homeless and costing millions in damage. But the locals who stuck around after the disaster banded together to rebuild Greensburg from the ground up, recreating a community that buzzes with small-town charm. The dedication, growth, and teamwork embodied by the community are quite similar to the values that founded the nearby Morning Star Farms.

Roger and Leslie Stotts established Morning Star Farms just north of Greensburg in 1985 when Roger split off from the family farm and entered the agricultural industry on his own. The couple eventually grew the business into a multi-family partnership, and today, Morning Star Farms encompasses an array of crops including corn, soybeans, and small grains. They also specialize in large-scale alfalfa hay production; however, as head of forage operations, Kevin Melvin contends the hay enterprise is less about the end-product and more about the end-customer.

“A lot of what we do is logistics,” said Melvin, who answered the call for his current position in 2004, moving to Kansas from Tennessee. “I think in the hay business there are a lot of gray areas. I get along better operating that way than I do with the structure of the row-crop industry.”

Alfalfa comprises about 3,500 acres across the farm’s total area, which are all irrigated under pivots fed by the Great Bend Prairie Aquifer. Mother Nature affords this pocket of south-central Kansas an average of 22 inches in annual rainfall. Another 18 inches or so of irrigation water is applied to most hayfields, which are expected to yield five cuttings per year — sometimes four, sometimes six — and average stand life is five to six years.

Caden Patterson was first employed at Morning Star Farms as a teenager in 2016 and now works with Melvin to make up a two-man hay marketing team. Patterson recalls the only hay being produced on the farm when he started on was in the form of 3x4 bales. Now, they additionally produce three-tie bales, 3x3 bales, haylage, chopped hay, and alfalfa pellets. Diversification is key to the profitability and prosperity of a farm at its size, especially when it comes to growing, packaging, and selling alfalfa to a wide customer base.

“We used to do one thing, and now we are packaging hay at least five different ways,” Patterson said. “They say don’t carry all of your eggs in one basket. There’s a list of customers you can sell 3x4s to, and there’s a list of customers you can sell chopped hay to, and so on. We just spread out and find the demand.”

Bale by number

A busy harvest schedule is one gray area of the hay business. To provide some clarity, every pivot circle is numbered, and all field activity is time-stamped. The team records the dates that hay was cut, raked, and baled, organizing these logs according to when fields will be ready for the next part of the process. Then, when bales are stacked, they earn an inventory number, which is important when hay is sold.

“Everything is numbered for simplicity — I can tell you where all the hay circles are at on a map,” Patterson said.

Melvin explained that they always aim to cut alfalfa prior to bloom stage. This is partly to capture high-quality forage, shooting for premium-quality alfalfa, especially during fifth and sixth cuttings. The other reason for an early harvest is to limit the presence of blister beetles, which can inhabit plants at later stages of maturity.

“One thing I think is interesting is that people have a perception that hay from Kansas has a higher risk of blister beetles, but there are decisions we can make and steps to take to be safe from that,” Melvin said.

Morning Star Farms runs Massey Ferguson swathers and small square balers, as well as Krone large square balers. They prioritize close connections with the manufacturers, which not only benefit the farm but also the company.

“We think it’s important to have a two-way relationship with the dealers and manufacturers,” Melvin said. “We’ve helped them develop some aspects of their machines, and we have even hosted summer interns.”

Patterson chimed in, “It’s a two-way relationship because there is some research and development we can do since we are so diversified and run so many different machines. But to be able to run those machines, we have to be able to talk to the manufacturers when we have a problem and get the service we need.”

They have added five Staheli West bale steamers to their forage fleet since 2012, which have greatly improved their harvest flexibility. Instead of waiting until after dark — or the middle of the night — to bale hay when cooler temperatures and more humidity set it, they can do so during daytime hours.

“Without the steamers, we would have to bale hay from 10:30 or 11 at night until 3 or 4 in the morning,” Patterson said. “It allows us to open up that window and get bales picked up and in the shed before it rains.”

Prior to using the bale steamers, Melvin said farm employees spent 20 to 22 days a month in the field waiting for the right conditions to swath, rake, and bale. Now that the steamers streamline those operations, that number is condensed to a collective 10 days a month, give or take. Even though he purports the machines may be more common in desert-like climates compared to the somewhat humid summers of south-central Kansas, steaming hay reduces the downtime needed to let dew develop between raking and baling. And less wait time equals less gray area surrounding the risk of sporadic weather.

“Our weather is unpredictable,” Melvin said. “You go to Arizona, Colorado, or Utah and they have a monsoon season, but after that, they know it’s not going to rain. Sometimes, it’s like monsoon season all year here.”

After a couple of days drying under the hot Kansas sun, alfalfa was raked and set to bale that afternoon.

The middlemen

In addition to growing and selling its own alfalfa, Morning Star Farms markets hay from various producers across the country. They move several hundred loads a month; however, as their output continues to grow, their list of buyers has gotten shorter, especially considering that a big chunk of their alfalfa is sold to dairies.

“You can really feel the consolidation in the dairies in the last five or six years. There are so many customers that are just gone.” Melvin said.

He added that Garden City is another hub for Kansas hay production where producers are better positioned to ship hay west and south to Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Being 100 miles further east, Morning Star Farms is set up better for east-bound trucking. In fact, if their hay isn’t sold to local buyers, it’s most likely headed east. Chopped alfalfa is in high demand from feedlots; large square bales primarily go to dairies in Eastern states, including Pennsylvania; and a growing portion of total hay production is dedicated to the equine industry in places like Kentucky and Florida.

Given the breadth of their customer base, Patterson and Melvin agree it can be complicated to price hay — another gray area. The two-man team refuses to solely rely on reported prices. Rather, they determine hay value based on a number of factors, including the price of corn, soybeans, and other commodities. As these commodity prices vary by region, so does the price of the hay they are selling to those locations.

“We determine the price of hay by getting out and seeing people,” Melvin said. “We are aware of what the other commodities are. You’ve got to be priced relative to what their other feed ingredients are — and trucking costs.”

Checks and balances

All income and expenses for individual transactions are recorded in a custom-built database. In addition to the hay inventory number derived from the farm’s harvest data, these tickets include price per ton of hay sold, freight costs, purchase weight, and delivery weight.

Wayne Keeton manages the accounting software. Documenting every detail of each sale is critical to account for the thousands of tons of hay made on-farm and bought from vendors over the course of a year. Morning Star Farms also has a dedicated office staff that ensures these details are correct and accurate.

“We sometimes joke that we know more about our vendors’ hay than they do, but it’s often true — when you’re dealing with customers and vendors, a lot of times they don’t have the office space to store all this data,” Keeton said. Moreover, plugging numbers into the database is usually more accurate and time-efficient than calculating costs and profits with pen and paper.

“It takes out so much of the human error,” Patterson said.

Keeping records also allows Morning Star Farms to predict hay demand from individual customers.

“We can forecast their demand almost as well as they could — maybe even better since we track historic number and actually have the numbers behind it,” Keeton said. “Then, once we get through alfalfa harvest, we’ll know if we have enough product available to handle them, even if they haven’t entered a purchase contract. Having enough product available no matter who calls is something Kevin focuses on.”

About 80% of Morning Star’s hay customers are repeat buyers; the rest is driven by forage demand in drought areas.

“We are always trying to build up more repeat business, but there is always room to pick up new customers,” Melvin said. “If somebody calls and wants to buy hay, we will sell them hay. Maybe I can’t sell them our hay, but I can sell them a load of hay from somebody else.”

That dedication to good service is what keeps the wheels constantly turning on trucks hauling hay out of the farm gate. And the ability to atone for occasionally unmet expectations keeps customers coming back to Morning Star Farms despite any mishaps.

“If we make a mistake and overcharge somebody or underpay them, we’ll catch it, we’ll make it right, and then we’ll cut them a check,” Keeton said. “Regardless how big or small the mistake, giving our vendors and customers the comfort of knowing that we will always do the right thing is priceless for building relationships.”

This goodwill and customer loyalty confirms the systems set in place at Morning Star Farms are effective. It can be challenging to navigate the gray areas of field activity, price discovery, and hay marketing at such a large scale, but the forage team works hard behind the scenes to account for every bale, turning gray into green.

This article appeared in the July 2025 issue of Hay & Forage Grower on page 16-21.

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