Making Haylage for the First Time

One is bound to make mistakes when doing something as complex as making haylage for the first time.  I had knee high grass by Memorial Day weekend and I was anxious to try out the haylage making equipment for the first time.  I cut the grass on the Thursday before Memorial day weekend.  My first mistake is evident in the photograph on the right.  I am driving the tractor on the uncut grass when I should be driving on the cut grass.  The tractor wheels are crushing the uncut grass which makes it stay below the mower blades when cutting on the next pass. 

Haylage can be cut, raked, baled and wrapped all in one day.  Hay needs to dry out for several days or longer depending on the weather.  Despite the picture perfect weather that Thursday, it rained Thursday afternoon.  Friday morning was sunny again so I let the cut grass dry out until noon.  I then raked the grass into 4 foot wide windrows and let it dry out for another 3 hours.  At that point I started baling.  I am in a very mountainous area and my very first bale rolled down the hill and into the woods.  I just wanted to cry.  I carried on and started releasing the bales only onto the more flat areas of the field.  I later retrieved the bale in the woods with my tractor and bale grabber, putting my tractor at great and unnecessary risk.

In the above picture you can see where the tractor wheels crushed the grass and the grass did not get cut on the next pass.  The next day it has sprung up again.   I ended up getting 20 bales but I damaged 4 in various ways.  One I ran over with the tractor.  If it was hay, it would not matter.  Haylage is a different matter.  Each bale must be in good shape and condition or the wrapper will not work for that bale.  I need 50 round bales of haylage to get trough the coming winter, so I will need to bale twice more: end of July and end of September.  After the bales are made, they must be wrapped within 12 hours.  Each bale is wrapped in plastic so that the fermenting process can begin.  In my next blog post, I will go into the wrapping process more.