OFI 710: Farming, A Game The Whole Family Can Play

Nothing Like Building A Little Fence To Bring The Family Together

We have been on our farm for over 8 years now, and we have been continuously developing it since the day we signed the papers on it.  It is kind of divided into two sections by a creek that runs through the middle.  One the eastern half is our house and our pastures.  On the western half is our hay field.  Today’s show is focused on our hay field.

When we first bought this place it did not take me long to figure out that I had more work to do than time available.  So, about six months after purchasing our farm I made, what was then, a difficult decision to lease out part of it.  Part of me felt like a failure when I did this, but looking back I now know it was a wise decision.

The western half of our place is about 16 acres in size with about 11 of that being farmable.  When we purchased the place it was all covered in weeds that were about 4 feet high, there was a very old, perimeter fence around it that was unsuitable for cattle and the oval berm of a previous horse racing track was still there with wooden fence posts around its perimeter.

The entire area could be irrigated, but at that time only by flood irrigation in culverts coming from gated pipe.  And with the berm in the way, that would not work, so that entire berm and all of the fence posts would have to be removed before this could even be thought of.

At the time I put it up for lease I did not realize what a hot commodity that I had.  However, in 2012 the price for hay was through the roof, and people were scrambling to find ground that they could plant forage on to minimize their input costs.  So, the day my ad went up on Craigslist, my telephone rang off of the hook.

I ended up leasing the land to a guy about my age named Kevin, and we became friends.  He and his wife, with their son on her lap, drove tractor and a bobcat around that field for days and removed all of the wooden fence posts and the berm.  Soon, the field looked pretty good for being worked by a couple of amateurs with only two pieces of equipment.  It was irrigatable, and they planted alfalfa into it to feed their cattle.

Kevin got the alfalfa up and going that year and did all of the irrigation.  However, the next winter his wife landed a great job in Montana, their home state.  They could not pass up the opportunity to return to the Treasure State with even better pay, so they decided to return.

I bought out Kevin’s lease for the cost of what he had put into making that field farmable.  It was a bargain and a stroke of good luck because if I had hired all that work done by a custom operator I will have had still paid the same input costs on top of the hourly charge.  The next spring Autumm, Hattie and I started irrigating.

Irrigating this field, with all of its gophers and voles was very frustrating.  Especially since we had never irrigated from gated pipe before.  But eventually we figured out how to get water all the way down to the bottom without using all of our water allotment for just one irrigation.

Pretty soon we found out about the NRCS Equip program and promptly signed up.  By the next spring we had a pump pushing water through a wheel line on that field.  Irrigation became much easier, and now was just a one person job.  I also started producing more hay and using less water.

At about year four the production from this field peaked, and it has been declining ever since.  At the same time we are raising more cattle and goats than when we first started, so our demand for hay has risen.  This ultimately led me to the decision as production has dropped off and the alfalfa stand has thinned to convert this field to pasture.

This spring I had a pasture mix drilled into the existing stand of alfalfa.  I thought I might graze it this season, but I opted not to do so.  We still had a good enough crop of alfalfa that I was worried about bloating cattle.  And, watching the progress of the new pasture grass I was concerned that the cattle might hurt this new stand by ripping out the roots or pushing it into the dirt if we grazed it too soon.  So, we decided to cut hay out of this field this year.

We took our third cutting off of this field in early September, and I decided that taking a fourth cutting was not the best thing for us to do.  So, I kept irrigating and growing the hay and new grass in preparation for some late fall grazing.  Well, winter showed up early at our place this week, and we just finished a week of lows in the low teens.  This killed all the alfalfa, and set up great conditions for the cattle to glean off everything that grew between 3rd cutting and our first hard freezes.

That old fence that was on the perimeter of this field just wasn’t going to do to keep cattle in.  So, before we could get them out there, it needed to be improved.  I looked at a number of options.  Believe it or not, the cheapest option I came up was to leave the existing old fence in place and reinforce it with heavy gauge, wire cattle panels.  That became our project this weekend.

So, starting on Friday I bought 85 of these cattle panels from the brand new D&B Supply that just opened down the road from our farm.  I met Autumm and Hattie out in the field and put Hattie in the pickup.  I put the truck in 4 low and let Hattie drive slowly along the perimeter while Autumm and I peeled panels off of the trailer one by one.

On Saturday we were all out there cutting wire, setting them against the existing fence and attaching them.  This went much slower than you would have thought.  So, on Sunday we were back out there, at it again.  A lot of the posts from the old fence were in bad shape or completely ripped out, so we had to drive a few t-posts into the ground to either reinforce or replace those.

By the end of Sunday, just before sundown we were done.  We had a completely fenced hay field that could be grazed in the winter by both cattle and goats.  Almost as if it were the end of a movie we got the cattle turned into this field as the sun was setting on the western horizon.  Watching them kick up their heels and explore the fence line before finally settling in to steady grazing was a pleasure.

It was a lot of fun to watch the difference in our cows as well.  I normally strip graze them in our pastures, and because our strips are narrow they usually line out shoulder to shoulder and work their way down the strip as one unit.  But this large parcel is different in that it is not cross fenced.  So they lined out linearly behind the lead cow in a totally different fashion than I am used to seeing.

That was a huge payoff for three days of working and 8 years of waiting to graze that side of the farm.  And once again, the farm brought a family together.  Whether it was Kevin and his family prepping that field to be planted in alfalfa or Autumm, Hattie and I listening to music and steadily working on that fence, it brought us together.  There was conversation, accomplishment and in the end, something all of us can look at and be proud of.

Where Off-Farm Income And Matt Brechwald Can Be Heard:

Member Of The National Association Of Farm Broadcasters