The Life of a Custom Mowing contractor

Hay Dude · 2025-06-24T07:01:04-0400

Cycledude said:
How do mushroom growers use the hay ?

They mix hay, straw, lime, chicken litter and some top soil together to make a bedding soil for the mushrooms to grow in.
Its a huge business in my area.
Any hay we make that’s not up to our feed hay standards is sold as mushroom hay.
There are also some fields in my area that would be rotary mowed. Owners don’t want rotational or row crop farming. Instead of rotary mowing, we bale them and sell that hay specifically as mushroom hay.

EddieWalker · 2025-06-24T09:15:45-0400

What's the price difference between mushroom hay and horse hay?

Hay Dude · 2025-06-24T20:54:54-0400

1/2 price

Hay Dude · 2025-06-24T21:11:08-0400

I started off the day delivering a feed 4x4x5 feed bale. It was too early to start baling, so it was a good time to get this bale delivered. Barely fits in my customers old Hay Hut.

Now back to baling…..
This stuff has a little color left, but got rained on twice. I was beautiful stuff.

It’s so hot, our hay is drier than a popcorn fart. I’m baling right behind freshly raked rows from my son in the raking tractor. Here we are out by the road. He’s raking some new headlands while I take a quick break.

By 6PM we were pretty whupped. About 99 degrees and humid. Tractors AC systems being stressed pretty good. My tractors are pretty old, I bet both could use an AC recharge.
I stayed out until 8 and stacked bales.

16’ high.
Because it’s so dry now, these averaged only 1,600lbs. Usually with typical moisture levels around here, they’re more like 1,800+ lbs. We made some over the weekend that were 1,800-2,000lbs. Just 2 days of extreme heat and bale moisture went from 18% to 0%!

Rustyiron · 2025-06-25T06:22:15-0400

Yeah at 8 pm yesterday it was just starting to get reasonable at about 82* here.

That's usually my upper limit but yesterday in comparison to earlier it felt nice.

Hay Dude · 2025-06-25T06:46:32-0400

It was a high of 63 degrees and constant rain here last week. Crazy how much the weather changed in just a few days. Now its mid 90’s and humid…
Looks like a lot of rain headed our way later this week (again).

Hay Dude · 2025-06-25T07:11:12-0400

We had a very strange occurrence on Monday I forgot to tell you about.
My son was in the raking tractor and a adult doe ran between the tractor and the wheel rake! The dumbass thing hopped around inside the “V” of the rake then bounded away before he came to a complete stop.
It ran back into a thicket, uninjured.
My son was kind of shocked and needed a moment to get going again. Sorry, no pictures.