Chad Gargas said he hasn’t worked a day in his life, and you get the impression that he really means it.
“I have good days and bad days, but I just love what we get to do every day,” said the fifth-generation Ohio hay and grain farmer who has long-term aspirations beyond just improving hay yield, quality, and soil health, although those things still consume his thoughts.
The affable 38-year-old puts people he talks to at immediate ease with his soft-spoken cadence. When Gargas speaks, you want to listen, and he wants to listen to you. Quickly, you’ll find he takes a great deal of pride in his family’s and farm’s history, of which he now finds himself a big part.
Gargas’s great-great grandfather, who lived to be 99 years old, came over from Germany around 1885 and bought the farm’s original 40 acres for $80 per acre in 1892. “That’s about what the property taxes are now,” the haymaker quipped during my visit to the operation last summer.
Gargas’s grandfather passed away in 2012, and Gargas got thrust from a farm worker to a co-ownership and management role at the age of 26 along with his father, Rich. “I probably wasn’t ready for that transition,” Gargas said honestly. “It helps that my dad and I share ownership of the farm. We each have our areas that we manage.”
On the most recent version of Gargas Farms, about 600 acres of hay is harvested each summer. “Ever since I can remember, we’ve had some hay on the farm, and it’s always been sold since we didn’t have livestock,” Gargas explained. “From 1963 to 1997, my grandfather was heavy into tomato production. When that market got terminated, we upped the hay acreage to several hundred. Since 2019, our hay acres, equipment, and storage space have doubled.”
In addition to the hay acres, the Gargases grow another 1,300 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat. They also bale about 300 acres of wheat straw. With nearly 1,500 acres of rented land, Gargas said they create a newsletter every year and send it to all their landlords so they can put a face to a name and see what we’re doing on their land. “When you live in grain country, you’d be surprised how many landowners prefer to have a forage crop growing on their land, so that’s often an angle we’ll take when trying to acquire rented land.”
Taken to timothy
About 380 acres of the Gargas’s hay acres are seeded to a three-way mixture of alfalfa, orchardgrass, and timothy. They like that mixture because the species seem to balance each other out in maturity and “look nice in a bale.” When establishing the three-way fields, Gargas seeds 12 pounds of timothy, 8 pounds of alfalfa, and 5 pounds of a late-maturing orchardgrass per acre.
The remaining 220 hay acres are seeded to straight timothy at a rate of 20 pounds per acre. “Timothy has become really popular in the equine market for those horses that don’t need a high-protein hay,” Gargas noted. “We get one big cutting off those fields in June, which is about 4 tons per acre, and if we get rain, then we can take a second timothy cutting at the end of August.”
In the past, Gargas said they seeded new forage stands in the late summer after harvesting wheat. “We have a real problem with volunteer wheat coming back in the hay crop the next spring. Because we seed a mixed stand, herbicide control isn’t an option once the new seeding emerges.”
Currently, Gargas is in the process of changing his seeding approach. “We are going to seed a cover crop after the wheat, then go in and seed an early maturing soybean the next spring,” he explained. “After the beans are harvested, we will no-till the forage seed into the stubble in early September.” Gargas has also moved away from using a 12-foot Brillion seeder to using their 40-foot John Deere air seeder, which can monitor seeding rate and be adjusted as necessary. The drill is set to seed at a 1/4-inch depth with a firm, but not excessive, down pressure.
The alfalfa-grass mixed stands are kept for four — or sometimes five — years. Gargas said that they often take one cutting in the spring and then terminate the stand, which is planted to soybeans. Fertilizer is applied to hayfields based on a yield removal of 5 to 5.5 tons per acre on mixed stands. They also spray for armyworms, alfalfa weevils, and potato leafhoppers as needed.
The northwest Ohio haymaker starts cutting in the spring when the alfalfa starts to flower and the timothy is fully headed. The goal is to have all the first cutting done by the end of June. Timothy is cut soon after heading — prior to cutting the mixed stands — and before leaf diseases limit forage quality and appearance. “Timothy fields are our highest priority from a harvest scheduling standpoint,” Gargas noted.
As for the alfalfa-grass mixed stands, the cutting schedule ranges from two to four cuttings per year, depending on the weather. Gargas typically puts the mower in the shed around Oct. 1.
Gargas’s hay is cut with a 16-foot self-propelled New Holland mower- conditioner and dropped in an 8-foot swath. For a heavier first cutting, Field Master Teddy Bear hay fluffers with 144 teeth are run over the swaths either once or twice. Two Miller Pro rotary rakes on a bridge hitch are used ahead of the balers, baling just a single windrow. Subsequent cuttings are raked two or three times with an H&S V-rake, always moving the hay onto dry ground. “We don’t run a tedder at all unless the hay gets rained on,” Gargas said.
Bale and bundle
All of Gargas’s hay production is small-square baled using four New Holland balers. Propionic acid is used when hay moisture runs marginally high. This is automatically controlled by the baler. “My target moisture is 14% to 15%,” Gargas explained. “Over 15%, we’ll start to apply acid at a low rate, then increase it if it gets higher.” The bales are picked up out of the field with three New Holland stack wagons. The farm currently has enough inside storage to accommodate 120,000 bales.
Bales are brought to the farm and allowed to “sweat” for one to two weeks, depending on humidity. After a month, some of the hay is bundled with a stationary hay bundler, which was purchased last year and is housed at the farm. How much hay gets bundled is based on customer preference and demand. “I wanted to give more options to more buyers, and the only way I saw that happening was to offer bundled hay, but we did not want to bundle in the field,” Gargas asserted. “I feel like I can better maintain quality control by being able to decide which bales get bundled. If there’s a bad bale or two, I can just pull those out.”
The work seems to get done with a rather lean labor force. “My dad and I are the only full-time workers on the farm,” Gargas said. “My brother, Ryan, is a full-time firefighter, but he works on the farm on his off days, so we factor that in when we’re planning to cut hay or spray. We have another employee who we hired during his high school days who farms on his own but comes to help us when he’s not busy at home. Other than that, we have a list of about 17 people who are available on an as-needed basis to help harvest hay. We like to keep a uniform set of tractors and balers so any employee can run any unit,” he added.
Improved marketing
There’s little point in making hay if you can’t sell it or feed it. Gargas, with a little help, has upped his marketing game by leaps and bounds during the past several years. He explained, “Going back to my grandfather’s days, we sold all our hay to one broker. We didn’t always agree on price, and he didn’t always pay on time or show up on time. Still, we were afraid to let him go because that’s all we had ever known. Joining the National Hay Association (NHA) changed the game for us. It allowed us to meet other reputable buyers and now we deal with 15 different brokers who all operate at high standards. Our previous buyer figured out we didn’t need him anymore if he wasn’t going to play by the rules.”
Like most commercial small square bale producers, Gargas caters to the equine market — but not exclusively. “Ninety percent of what we sell goes through a broker or dealer and then resells to their clients, which might include retail stores or zoos. We generally don’t know where our hay ends up.” For any hay that gets rained on and is poor quality, Gargas has several beef cattle farmers that will buy it. Typically, that hay is custom baled with a large-square baler.
Gargas’s brokers work in states like Kentucky, Florida, and Montana. “Because my grandpa only worked with one hay buyer his whole life, I didn’t realize how big the hay world really is until I got exposed to NHA,” Gargas said. “We don’t do any of the trucking, which is lined up by the hay buyers. We just don’t want to start trucking. Someone once told me to ‘stay in your lane’ and do what you’re good at. Let someone else do what they’re good at.”
Once at the farm, trucks are filled with hay using a homemade mobile loading dock. “It can be moved from shed to shed,” Gargas explained. “From a flatbed trailer, we push the hay into the vans using a tractor. It takes 30 to 40 minutes to fill a van.”
Playing the long game
Looking ahead, Gargas doesn’t really plan to expand his haymaking enterprise. “Six hundred acres seems to be our sweet spot based on available resources and the weather. Any more than that, and our quality starts to suffer, which I can’t afford to happen.”
So, what lofty goals does this Buckeye State haymaker have? His answer comes without hesitation.
“My ultimate goal is to be a debt-free farmer,” Gargas said with conviction. “My wife, Lyndsy, and I teach Dave Ramsey’s financial peace class and adhere to its principles at home. I inherited a lot of debt when my grandfather died, and there was no transition plan. I had to try and clean up that mess, but I don’t want to go back there again. I’m 38 years old, so I think the runway is long enough that it’s possible. I told my dad that one day I wanted to make hay just for the fun of it and not have to make hay to make money to pay the loan needed for the equipment used to make the hay. I hate being the rat in the wheel,” he concluded with emphasis.
This article appeared in the November 2025 issue of Hay & Forage Grower on page 7.
Not a subscriber? Click to get the print magazine.
