Although there is still corn silage harvest and the final cuttings of alfalfa have yet to be packed away, preplanning for those winter cereal plantings needs to begin sooner rather than later.Cereal f...
Don Witt remembers his dad mowing hay with a 5-foot sickle bar mower and having a one-row, pull-type forage chopper that he used to do custom chopping for the neighbors...
Okay, it’s not exactly of the magnitude of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, but the argument to cut hay exclusively in the late afternoon versus another time of day has always intrigued me...
There’s an old saying: “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” It’s usually said of a person who has potential that has never been fulfilled. Perhaps no forage species deserves the bridesmaid moniker more so than red clover...
It’s always interesting to note the variation between regions and farms in regards to how much plant stalk remains in a field following a corn silage harvest. In California, I’ve seen fields cut s...
The USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) recently announced that emergency haying and grazing will be allowed on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres contingent on the current state of drought sever...
As with planting corn or drying hay, so much of the daily grind of growing and harvesting crops is as much an art as it is a science. Nowhere is this truer than when building a silage pile or packing...
Alfalfa hay price holds in JuneThis year has turned out to be an odd and challenging one in many respects. Apparently, a normal hay market trend is joining the plethora of oddities. Alfalfa...
Back in the day, I would constantly correct people when they referred to a “fall seeding” of alfalfa. Fall is simply too late; more correctly, it was, or at least should be in the North, a “late...
