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| A beautiful field of aflalfa |
My mom Cherie Anderson wrote this on her Facebook page, and since she described it so well, I'm going to use it here! She also took all the pictures. Even though I grew up here, I didn't really pay attention until we started farming here ourselves. Growing and harvesting alfalfa to feed our cattle is a summer-long process with rewarding results!
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It’s haying time in Michigan. Everyone knows what hay is, but maybe not everyone knows the process. This is a field of alfalfa. Alfalfa is planted in late summer or early fall to use the following spring. It’s a high protein food for cattle. It’s a legume and has deep roots. A field will be good for three to five years, or even longer, depending on the weather and soil.
When the alfalfa is at the right maturity and there’s no rain imminent, the farmer mows it and the machine lays it in rows. Then a rake or merger will put those rows together into larger swaths, or windrows. Then a chopper will scoop up those rows, cutting the alfalfa into smaller pieces and shooting it into a wagon or truck which is driving alongside. It’s trucked to a cement pad, dumped out, and another tractor pushes it into a pile and drives over it, compacting the pile. When it’s all done, the pile is covered with plastic. The alfalfa ferments, does not rot or spoil, and makes nutritious, delicious feed for cows for later on. It’s called haylage.
You can also bale alfalfa into round or square bales. In that case, it has to be much drier than chopped alfalfa. You can’t bale wet hay. It can actually spontaneously combust, as crazy as that sounds.
Alfalfa is mixed with corn sileage and other feeds and fed to cattle. Hay for horses is generally not purely alfalfa - it is either grass hay or a mixture of alfalfa and grass. Alfalfa is harder for horses to digest. They only have one stomach, unlike a cow which has four.
The last picture shows the field when all the chopping is done. The cool thing is that the alfalfa will grow back and the farmer can get three, sometimes four, cuttings every summer! Of course, at that point you WANT rain, unlike when you’ve got hay on the ground.
Oh, and it smells wonderful when it’s freshly cut!
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Alfalfa close up
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| Tractor driving on continually to form file and compress it |
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| The alfalfa field afterward |
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| Ready to grow...in just 28ish days we do it again! |
