2nd Cutting Finished - North Texas

[chetlenox]

Just because I've been enjoying all the good hay discussion so far this season, I'll give a quick synopsis of our Coastal Bermuda cutting this week.

The weather has been warm, sunny, and windy. Last Saturday was 4.5 weeks since the first cutting, so we pulled the trigger and cut. This is the second time I've used our new Frontier SB1107 sickle-bar cutter, and I'm still not spectacularly happy with the cut. It's still a little too high for my taste (remaining grass ~2-3 inches) and cutting a little ragged (not a uniform height). The skid-stops are set as low as possible, but I want to try a little more "forward tilt" on the entire unit to get the blades closer to the ground. I couldn't do it this time because my toplink was already set as small as possible, so I need to get a shorter toplink. I'm hoping that helps with my slightly ragged cut as well. Overall though, this was a little thing, for the most part the cut is fine. Heck, I've heard it's better on the grass to leave it a hair long anyway.

Raking went fine. The old mid-70s rebuilt (a month ago) New Holland 256 hay-rake did great.

Yesterday evening we took a look at how the hay was curing and with all the warm weather and sun, it was time to bale. So we baled 182 bales, sold ~70 or so out of the field, and put the rest in the top of the barn. This is the lightest cutting we've had so far since moving here, which is a little aggravating considering I spent a fortune on fertilizer 3-4 weeks ago. But the truth is we just haven't gotten that much rain, only about an inch-and-a-half since the first cutting. Without the water, the grass doesn't grow. Our typical yields have been 400-600 bales in the past, and we had 505 1st cutting this year.

We definitely won't have the damp hay issue we had with the 1st cutting this year. Not only did the hay cure quickly, but we baled a little lighter (~45 lbs) and stacked all the hay on the well-ventilated side of the barn. My new handheld moisture meter isn't in yet, so I didn't get a chance to use it, so I'll try that next cutting.

So now I'm going to put ~75 lbs/acre of nitrogen down and start doing a little rain dance. I'll attach some pictures from last night for entertainment value... Especially the rat snake that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got "baled"!

Chet.

 

[WTA]

We've been staying in close contact with a doctor here at Tech that does a lot of research on Bermuda grown for hay and she has been getting on me about the fertilizer. She says never to go over 60 pounds per acre on irrigated and nowhere near that on dryland. I usually put right at 60 on ours and the one time we did go to 75 pounds the nitrate levels in the hay got a little high for safety. It was borderline dangerous. Be careful when using that much and have it tested is all I'm saying.

My first cutting this year sucked bad. I'm used to getting over 400 bales off my 7 acre Giant bermuda field. I barely got a quarter of that. We had the rain. 10 inches worth. But I didn't fertilize it due to cost. Last night I put out 60 pounds per acre and I'm irrigating the tar out of it right now.
I sure can't afford another loss like that.

I was wondering what kind of cutting cycle you are on? I'm dong mine in a 28 day cycle. Usually we would have just had our second cutting but the weather stayed cool late into this season. Way too cool for the bermuda to grow. In fact, it was so thin this cutting that it only took 24 hours to dry. I'm used to raking every day for about 7 days then baling because the windrows are so thick.
That fertilizer makes a huge difference!

Your place sure looks nice. It reminds me of back home in Tennessee. There aren't many trees around here and I sure miss it. All we have is a small pecan and fruit tree orchard that the last owner planted and we're on a mission to plant one tree a month in our irrigated fields.

I liked that picture of the snake. I haven't done that here yet thankfully. I did run over a really big snapping turtle last week with the swather though. It sounded like it had blown up back behind me so I quickly shut off the PTO and stopped the tractor. A big alligator snapper maybe 50 pounds or so had somehow got sucked up and went through the tightened down conditioner rollers. They jumped apart and broke the chain apart. There wasn't much left of the turtle. I don't know how something that big got that far back in the thing to begin with but it sure was messy.

 

[chetlenox]

Hey WTA,

I've been following your equipment stories closely (sorry about your bad fuel incident), Now that I'm in my second year, I'm starting to understand enough about this stuff to feel a pretty healthy "kinship" with all my neighbors sweating through their hay farming chores!

That's interesting that you are getting that feedback from your Tech Ag folks. I'm actually following the guidance from my soil samples that I took over the winter, that showed my soil needed 85 lbs/acre Nitrogen and 73 lbs/acre phosphorous, plus an addition 100 lbs/acre Nitrogen for each subsequent cutting! I only ended up putting 63 lbs of Nitrogen and 54 lbs of phosphorous, like you, trying to save a little cash. But was planning on hitting the Nitrogen pretty hard second time around. Maybe I need to do a little more reading. What is the name of your person at Tech? I can do a literature search using her name and maybe find some of her research.

I hear you on the impact of the fertilizer. My wife spread the fertilizer after the 1st cutting this year, and ran short of the entire field by a hundred feet or so. No big deal, but it was amazing what a dramatic difference in yield there was between that little spot and the rest of the field!

Yeah, I try to do that 28 day cycle. I've heard that 4 weeks is ideal and 6 weeks is pretty much absolute maximum (and you've already had some quality loss if you wait that long). Last year, with all the rain, I wasn't able to get a window to bale my 2nd cutting until 8 weeks, and man did the digestable protein content drop through the floor, it was really terrible hay. My methodology, for better or for worse, is to aim for 4 weeks and delay by a few days to as much as a week if necessary for weather. I also send in every cutting for analysis. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten the results back from my 1st cutting yet and I just sent my 2nd cutting in today, so it will be a while before I have feedback from this year.

It's funny that you mentioned the delayed start to the Bermuda due to cool weather. I don't have any good feel for what is cool and warm by season (I just moved here from Oregon a year-and-a-half ago), but I noticed that my Bermuda had a slow start and my Winter Rye didn't want to stop as compared to last year. I ended up with a pretty close to 50/50 mix of Bermuda/Rye in this 2nd cutting, and am selling at a discount as a result. That's another reason I'm pretty interested in my hay test results, I want to see what that mix looks like.

Thanks for the compliment on the place, I appreciate it. I'd definitely go for some more/bigger trees myself, not to mention a hill or two. I miss that part of Oregon, that's for sure.

Wow, snapping turtle in the conditioning rollers, holy cow! I'm sure lots of folks have had snakes in their hay, but not many can claim that!

Chet.

 

[WTA]

I forget that ladies name at TTU. My wife usually talks to her since they are both professors and I don't want to sound stupid to her. My wife teaches there too but in a different department. I'll find out though and send you a PM sometime.

I have learned something new about this bermuda this year too. Actually I started it last year but I found that if it takes me a few days to fertilize after I pick up the hay and a lot of the grass has gone to seed then I go out there with my 14 foot shredder and cut it all back to about 3 inches, knocking off all the seed heads.
What I discovered is once it goes to seed that particular plant pretty much stops growing in height. Even if I fertilize and start throwing the water at it. I don't know if it works the same for your coastal or not but it makes a huge difference on this Giant bermuda. Plus it adds a little bit of organic material back to the soil that it normally doesn't get when haying it.

I'm guessing you don't water yours though so it's probably a totally different boat you are in. We have to irrigate everything here.

Oh, about the tech people helping out, it's a state school so I figured they would one day when I was getting absolutely no help at all from any of the other state or federal organizations. Bermuda is a weird thing here as it takes so much water and that is somethign we don't get much of naturally. Everyone I talked to at first when I was thinking of planting it told me it would not grow here. Most places, like the NRCS were trying to talk me into planting bluestem but I wanted a midsouth type of horse farm here in West Texas instead of a typical western place. I'm from Tennessee after all so I have to be different. One place, I think it was a USDA person, was even trying to talk me into all alfalfa instead of bermuda. We planted a little alfalfa last fall but to me it's too labor and water intensive. The cotton farmers are the ones that want all alfalfa crops on farms like mine I have found out. It's because on the Bermuda I use 24D a good bit normally and their crops are sensitive to that. You can't use it on alfalfa. They all try to tell me it's illegal spraying that weedkiller on my crops when theirs are growing but they can all bite me. Their crop dusters with roundup and whatever that defolient is they use have completely wiped us out twice now. I use my brain when spraying so as not to hurt anyone elses crops.
Cotton farmers her think they rule the world I swear. I guess I showed them though. They all kept saying this bermuda wouldn't grow but it has and it's even resistant to their herbicides.

 

[Egon]

Very nice pictures.

But my back starts aching just looking at them!

 

[chetlenox]

WTA,

I like your idea of "reseting the clock" with a quick clip if you've got a delayed fertilizer dose, that seems like a good idea. I don't get seed heads from the Coastal (I assume Giant does), but it definitely does the grow to a certain height and slow thing once I clear 5-6 weeks. I'm in that exact fix right now, since I cut and baled last week but the ground is dry and there is no rain in sight, so I'm delaying putting the fertilizer down. Maybe if we can get some rain to come this far south, I'll hit it with the cutter and fertilizer right before it arrives. I hear you on the wind, man, it's been blowing like a hurricane for two days around here!

So they don't do Coastal Bermuda much around you, heh? It's funny that they would say don't use Bermuda but grow Alfalfa. I don't know much, but I have always heard that alfalfa takes a lot of water. Around here pretty much all the hay pastures are Coastal Bermuda. It was already established when we bought the place a year-and-a-half ago, so we've just been working on getting the weed content down (mainly just by fertilizing and cutting, which seems to be helping).

That's pretty interesting about your cotton farmer neighbors nervous about your Bermuda. Makes sense though. I'll bet you are right, the local extension agent's preference for alfalfa probably has more to do with your 24D then anything else (the water thing sure doesn't make sense). I'm in an area that is mostly grazing pasture and baled grass hays, with a little sorghum and scattered other grain crops as well. We don't have cotton here.

I'm going to have to pick your brain a bit sometime on how you use 24D, both dosage and proper spraying. I don't have a sprayer, but I've been trolling Craigslist for a used 50-gallon 3-pt for a while (unsuccessfully). I've still got a few patches of broadleaf weeds that are hanging on, and I've heard 24D works pretty well. I've also heard lots of warnings and horror stories from neighbors. You know, the "killing tomato plants in the next county" sorta stuff... so I definitely want to do it properly.

Chet.

 

[WTA]

The big thing is don't spray it when it's windy. I try not to but sometimes I don't have much choice. In that care I use my big fertilizer nozzles and speed the ground speed up a bit. Even so, if it was going to do any damage, I'd notice it in my trees. They would be the first effected. The only time my trees have ever been hurt is that darn crop duster defoliating the cotton across the highway. He's done it twice. Thankfully they all came back but we lost the crop of pecans on them. My wheat took a bad hit too when they did that. That nut has no business going a full mile across the road to do his turn over my place. They've all been warned by me and my neighbors, who are lawyers, not to do it again.

For the sprayer, I'd find a bigger one if I were you. Mine holds a hundred gallons and it's not big enough for me. When doing fertilizer on that 7 acres, I have to fill it three times and it's a pain.
The spray rates are all on the bottles label and are pretty easy but I've found that the lowest rate works on nearly everything. We have one weed here that takes the highest spray rate, I don't know what it's called but I spot spray those. Bind weed and lake weed take a pretty good dose or two mild doses about a week apart. Most of the poisonous stuff we have though is easy to knock out with it. Just be careful at the higher rates, it does stunt the growth of the grass just a little if you use a lot.

 

[chetlenox]

Wow, 100 gallon isn't enough? Huh, I guess I'll have to rethink that then. How about when you are just spraying herbicides (not fertilizer), does the 100 do it for you then?

Chet.

 

[WTA]

If I'm just spraying herbicide with the small nozzles then it's good for about 10 acres but the wind really tells me what nozzles I'll be using. The small ones atomize the liquid real good and it blows away in any kind of wind. Big ones make a bigger droplet that is usually heavy enough to hit the ground.

 

[callen]

Hello,

With the cost up so much on hay production how much are yall charging for a 45#-60# bales. We just did our first cutting here in southwest mississippi, and got 800 bales off our 18 acre alchia bermuda field. It's also starting to get very dry here also. We are charging 6.00 bale. We have too because other people in our area cut out throats by balling trash hay and sell much cheaper. We have been in the hay business for 20 years and this is the hardest its ever been on us. I hope the economy gets better are the farmers are going to be out of business.

This is my first post I look forward to chatting with yall!!