Dairy farmers now have an option to purchase consistently high-quality hay that provides 23.3 percent crude protein and virtually no waste because of the way it’s processed.

When large round hay balers first became popular in the 1970s, one of their strong selling points was the fact that you could store the bales in the field without covering them.

Nearly three years ago, when Travis Armitage, Lynn Sedelbauer and Aaron Kidd came together to form Trinity Farms, the idea was to combine forces to utilize everyone’s strengths.

Storage
After all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making that stack of perfect hay, added to alternately praying for and cursing the weather, how about a little common sense in storing the product?

Jim Howard of Nebraska is a full-time life insurance salesman and a minister for a small local church. But on the side he puts up prairie hay. “I look to cut hay in places where most people wouldn’t put it up. If I can drive my tractor there, I can put up hay there,” Howard says.

Some of you reading this may never have considered the ensilage process as a preservation option, while others of you have been practicing this preservation technique since you and your pitchfork first lost your job to a silo unloader.

Agricultural settings support a wide array of wildlife because of the mix of cover and forage.

For livestock producers wanting the most out of their pastures, measuring forage dry matter content before and after livestock grazing is the most effective way of managing an intensive grazing system.

As herd sizes have grown, so have the storage units that preserve the forages used to feed dairy cows.

Leo made one of many interesting comments as we were riding together some years back. “If that truck you are following,” he started, “is taking the curves in the road about five miles an hour slower than the curves are posted for, then there is a good chance that the driver used to haul hay.”