Save Money, Save Time, Buy Hay

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Buying hay from other farms meant no longer paying for diesel and tractor fuel, fluids, and filters, paying annual taxes on the equipment, or maintaining a shed to protect the machines.
Buying hay from other farms meant no longer paying for diesel and tractor fuel, fluids, and filters, paying annual taxes on the equipment, or maintaining a shed to protect the machines.
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“Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers’ Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm” by Forrest Pritchard.
“Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers’ Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm” by Forrest Pritchard.

A memoir, Gaining Ground(Lyons Press, 2013) follows Forrest Pritchard as he returns to the family farm and struggles to bring it back to life. Wishing to imitate to the pure and personal farming techniques of his grandparents, Pritchard learns the hard way what it takes to farm organically, live sustainably, and turn a profit while taking care of crops and livestock. Pritchard writes honestly about his life and his family in this book; he recounts his experiences, his trials and errors, and his personal hopes and fears about the important work to which he found himself called.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Gaining Ground.

My family was united by the solemn fact that if we didn’t harvest enough hay in the summer, our cattle would starve to death come wintertime. Faced with this reality, haying had always been a mandatory activity. My grandfather had kept two years’ worth of hay in his barns, safely weathering both winter blizzards and summer droughts. The shadowy recesses of our barn contained bales that had been put up decades earlier; properly cured, hay remains palatable almost indefinitely. I now felt a responsibility to keep my own barn fully stocked.

Still, the longer I considered it, the harder time I had making sense of the math. Labor and repairs topped my list of concerns, and it didn’t help that cattle prices had recently fallen again. Our last load of calves had brought only seventy cents per pound at the stock sale, a 10 percent drop from the prior year. As I ran to town on yet another trip for tractor parts, this meager paycheck eroded right before my eyes.

But this was how we’d always done it, I kept telling myself. This was how my grandfather, and all my neighbors, farmed. Haying was simply an unavoidable part of cattle farming, a season of costly aggravation that kept the business afloat. Resigned to my duty, I climbed onto my Ford tractor and headed back into the fields.

  • Published on Sep 29, 2016
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