Welcome to Just Say Hey, the podcast, a podcast where we talk about the things that matter to small farmers. Why? Because we are a small farm. We've been doing this I've been doing the farming thing. I've been farming now as a hobby for about 15 years, trying to learn, trying to grow.

About five years ago, we had the idea to start this as a commercial operation. We've raised cattle and we've raised hay, our own hay. And then about five years ago, we started to think let's grow hay for the community.  And we started with, I don't know, we started our first commercial year. We had, oh, maybe a hundred and, maybe a hundred and eight, 150 acres. 

Now,  several years later, we're up to about 850 acres of total ground, but I thought it would be interesting this year, one of the big things I do every year, and my wife and I sit down and we have this conversation is, what did we do well? And most importantly, what did we do poorly? What did we do wrong?

What can we do next year to fix some of the problems we had this year? So I thought, you know what? This would make an interesting podcast. As people listen. People who listen to this, they probably have their own challenges. You probably have your own challenges, what you're trying to accomplish, and you run across pitfalls.

And the thing that I've learned in my career about this is to not allow the pitfalls to stop you, but allow them to help you grow and get better. And so that's what we're going to do today. So let's get into it. Welcome to Just Say Hey, the podcast where we talk about what matters to small farms, whether it's business, marketing, agronomy, equipment, livestock health.

If it matters to small farms, we'll probably talk about it here. So let's get into it. So good morning. Hope you all are having a wonderful day. I'm having a great day. It's been, it's raining right now, which is much, much needed. We've gone through August of, which was a moderate drought here. And we've gone through September, a moderate drought, and now we're getting all of our rain for both months in a period of just a couple of days.

Let's first say thanks for the rain, though. Thank you, God, for the rain. Let's take a look, and like I said with this podcast, I want to talk about what we did right and what we did wrong this year in our operation.  And  we did some things right  with our hay was a higher quality this year than it was last year because we got some things straightened out still had some problems on the agronomy side, the 2024 season started out as a really wet spring.

And what did that do for everybody? It delayed our harvest.  And plants got a little more mature grasses got a little stemmier, we got a few fields that we got in right at the right time and had, several hundred bales of grass hay that was just perfect. We got some alfalfa that was just perfect, we got some alfalfa that was less than perfect, and  weather played a big challenge in it.

And what I noticed this year was in the 2024 year, What that early spring harvest did was it put a lot of hay on the market that was low quality. And so if you are raising cattle and you're just using feed as a base for your feed program, it's not your total feed program, there's a lot of cheap hay on the market right now, at least in our area.

But  what it did, for the quality hay was there is a lower amount of high quality hay available. And in our business, we saw, you see the market rise and fall, and other parts of the country had a really good year. Our our really high quality alfalfa product, the price came down a little bit.

But the lower end of our products, the cattle hay that we round bale for people, That's dropped quite a bit and so we really, as always, our core market are equestrians, people who ride horses for either fun or they're, we support a lot of stables. We have, I think there's probably 10 or 15 large stables that rely on us for a consistent forage product.

And we're, we work hard at it. The weather has had more of an impact on us. than just our harvest and the mechanics and agronomy of getting a good crop in it really it impacted the price we had some other issues this year that were unforeseen you can't predict the weather and anybody who says you can  They're just kidding you  but we had we have several pieces of ground that fall over top of I believe it's called the Texas Northeastern Pipeline.

It was built back decades ago. And it runs from Texas to, I want to say it's up near New York where it finally terminates. And it was built during wartime. I think it was World War II,  but I'm not sure. But there are three pipes that run in there.  And you deal with, they have easements onto your property. 

And we were farming a piece of ground,  got a notice from one of the pipeline companies, the landowner got a notice, we didn't because we leased that ground.  They came out  and dug a huge hole in the middle of our, one of our alfalfa fields.  And it was right in the middle, not like they could have done it on an edge, right smack dab in the middle.

And it's a smaller field, so It's one of our, it probably is our smallest field. It's only about four acres,  four or five acres, and they dug it up, made a huge mess, but on the positive side, when they came back in, they paid us for our crop. They paid us for the inconvenience. They took care of us really well.

I can't complain. I can't complain with that at all. They did it. They did it as good of a job as they could have done it at, I don't know the quality of the pipeline repair, obviously, but. As far as them, them doing a quality job from the landowner and the farmer and the person who leases the ground and farms the ground, I don't know how they could have done it any better.

Was it perfect for me? No, because now there's a big hole in the middle of an alfalfa field that I can't replant for a year because of the auto toxicity issues with alfalfa.  So that was a little bit of a challenge and hiccup. But, all in all, not horrible.  The dealing with companies like that, you can take a hard line and be a jerk working with them and they're still gonna have to do their job.

You can choose to be that way and they say they're, they deal with a lot of landowners or a lot of farmers that they have to deal with that are just horrible to deal with.  I tend to take a different approach. They, they have the right to do that whether I give them permission to or not.

What I decide, how I decide to act is, that's up to me and I choose to try my best to work with them, help them out they need to borrow equipment, they need to move equipment, whatever I can do to help them, I try to do, because in the end, if I make it easy for them, they've made it, they made it really easy for me, it wasn't perfect, but again, I don't know how they could have done it any better, but that pipeline was, that was an interesting thing this year, I had never dealt with that.

Had that one horrible experience with that company, but this one that we did it with this year was man They were awesome. I wish I could work with them every time.  Oh Increased ground a little bit this year. We picked up another 70 acres a little bit further away It's our furthest field from the farm.

I think driving it's Three miles now. I take it back it's it's about five miles to get to that far north piece of ground that we picked up  landowners Awesome. What a super guy. And, I think I made him mad. I didn't mean to. We had a, as with everything, most of the agreements I have, they're handshake agreements.

You do your thing, I do mine, and we'll all get along. We had a stable come and ask us for a lot more grass hay next year, and we don't have quite enough grass to go around, so we were going to plant some more, and I in my thinking, I said, oh we picked up this new ground, instead of planting more alfalfa, I'll plant grass, and I didn't think about the conversations that he and I had, where he wanted alfalfa on that ground, not grass. 

And, again, this is a handshake wor just a handshake deal between two guys. And he is a super good guy,  and once he reminded me of it I, all I could do is say, Oh, you're right, I am so sorry, and I will fix it, because  I am a man of my word.  And, I did. Planted alfalfa up there, we're gonna restructure some other ground that the alfalfa's starting to play out, and so we're gonna take some grass hay that we have, we're gonna improve that stand, and we're gonna take another field, and, we worked it all out.

But again, if you do what you say you're going to do, most people are super easy to work with. And this guy has been an absolute dream to work with. Beautiful piece of ground good guy to work with. I'll say something else here, in thinking about working with people. 

We are a hay farm. We are a forage, commercial forage farm. I don't do any row crop. There are times when I'm working with people. Like, when you, again, picked up some new ground, picked up, and we're getting ready to convert some ground.  What we do, what we what we did this past year was I, again I'm not a very competitive, I don't I'm not very competitive.

I'm really competitive, but  I don't think of other businesses as my competition. I think of myself as my competition. And so I went to another farmer who is a friend of mine and said, Hey,  I want, I just picked up this ground. It was, we picked it up in the fall.  I have never had good luck doing a spring planting of alfalfa in this area because of the weed pressure. 

I've just never had good luck doing it.  And so I went to my friend and I said, Hey. I picked up this ground. Do you want to put it in an early bean? Put it in a group two bean that's going to harvest at the end of August. Gives me time to get my, you get your beans out. I'll get my alfalfa in.

And it all works out good. And that's what we ended up doing. And so it's become a really good relationship where I've got a field that I've never been able to get under control.  From an agronomy standpoint, I get weeds, I get I've never been able to get hold of it and get it in good shape the way I want it. 

And,  I went to Brian,  and if Brian around here, good guy, super good guy. I said, hey why don't you farm this for a year, I'll take it out of my rotation, you put it in a bean, put it in a group two bean, something you can pull out early, and then I'll come in behind you and plant my crop. 

And so it comes out of our rotation for a year, but it helps me from an agronomy standpoint,  But the relationship is the most important thing there because I can call him and say hey, do you want to do this and he'll give me an honest answer and he's a man of his word and I'm a man of my word and we just handshake agree to these things  and it works out really well and that those relationships that you build over time working with other farmers, working with Other people, man, it just, it makes life easy, got a farmer I'd met him a couple times over the years, super, super nice guy just had met him a couple times over the years just standing around talking at the feed store, whatever, and  my friend who passed away, my, my dear friend who passed away had two grain bins and wanted to rent And this guy wanted to rent one out, calls me, and  I am perfect, I've been trying to do my part to get the stuff working, and he can call and ask me for things, and if I can, I absolutely go help him.

Not only is it fun, but I like doing that.  And  all of a sudden he may have a couple acres for me. And so this give and take, this relationship that you build,  help you grow your business. They also, which is, and this is much more important in my thinking, is,  Knowing people, getting to know people, and having that network of people that you can call on in an emergency is important, especially when you're a new farmer, when you don't know anybody, when you don't know, when you don't have that 20, 30 years of experience, having guys that you can call and ask questions to.

And again, you don't have to agree with them all the time. You call, you get all the information you can, and then your responsibility is to make that decision. And if it doesn't work, it's your fault, not theirs.  And I, it's another guy that I've gotten to know pretty well. Like him, he's a super nice guy.

And another guy with lots of experience that is on my book that I can call if I have a question. Or, how did you do this? How did you solve this problem?  It is, that's an important aspect of farming. And if you're a new farmer, like me,  building that network of people that you know that can help you out is pretty important.

But, back on topic here. So how did the year turn out for us? 2024 was a, it was a pretty decent year. We bailed a total of just shy of 4, 000 bails. Could we have gotten more? Yes. In fact we had fields that we actually took a rotary cutter out and just bush hogged them down because with all the rain we started to see a lot of  And if you sell hay into the horse market, you know that once that foxtail comes up, the value, even if that hay is a super good quality hay, the value to the horse person drops to almost nothing because foxtail can be it's not damaging from a, from an initial health aspect to the horse.

It's not, it doesn't, it's not poisonous or anything like that, but the seed in the foxtail gets caught in the gum line of a horse and then that. It goes to fester and then the horse has dental issues and they don't eat and we try to stay away from Foxtail and we had a couple of fields that  we could have baled, would have made some bales.

But when you factor in the weather issues early in the season, so there's a lot of cheap hay on the market. So if we bailed it, it was going to be cheaper hay. So what we ended up doing is we went up and mowed them down, just knocked the seed heads off, took it down and left the nutrients on the ground.

Because if you farm, you know that when you take a crop off, it takes some of those nutrients in the soil with it. So we made the decision that there wasn't going to be that much profit in, there wasn't going to be that much revenue in. A lower quality hay or a lower value hay  and with the cost of fertilizer and everything we figured and the manpower it takes to bale because you have to mow it.

Break it, bale it, and you've got to stack it, haul it, unload it, load it, I mean there's all those mechanics that go into it. We figured that we were better off to just run out there with a mower and mow it down and put that, those nutrients, leave those nutrients in the field. Yeah, we could have baled more bales.

But we decided to just take the fields down and wait, be a little bit, a little patient with it and not take all that hay off, even though we could have, because it wasn't that, there wasn't that much value in it. So yeah, just shy of 4, 000 bales, 850 acres. Our farm is now, When we first started, our farm was in about a 2 to 3 mile radius.

Now we're in about a 10 mile radius. The things we did wrong.  We bought a piece of equipment. We probably, had we,  had it, had we had a chance to use it and run it, we probably would not have bought a good piece of equipment, don't get me wrong. We bought a Farm King. It's a 4480 XD.  And let me tell you, it's pretty awesome.

It does a really nice job. There is nothing wrong with this piece of equipment at all.  The downsides for us it takes a pretty high horsepower tractor to run it. Not the high horsepower, it takes a heavy tractor to run it, which when you get bigger, It's power, but it takes all, it's long. Let's see, it's 42 feet, 44 feet, something like that.

It's a long trailer.  And it takes a long, takes a lot of field to get it turned around and back lined up.  So it doesn't work in a lot of our small fields or up in some of the nooks and crannies of some of our fields. What we, we have to run up there. So we still have to have loaders and trailers in the field.

In our operation, I'm not sure that was the best piece of equipment we could have bought. It was certainly in the budget. Great piece of equipment. If you have big square fields, this thing is awesome.  Does a great job. It is for the value. Would one of the more expensive haystackers be better?

Sure. But the other haystacker we were looking at, the one that we thought would have been perfect, was almost 400, 000. This piece of equipment,  slower,  It takes a bigger field. It, it's got some downsides to it, but we bought it for, I don't know, it was like 65, 000. And the company, I called and talked with some of the engineers. 

They were great to work with. The guys up there, I got through to a guy and he walked me through a bunch of issues. A bunch of issues, a bunch of questions I had, he was able to answer them. Now, granted this is made out in Kansas, it is, like I said it, super nice trail, super, super nice, but, probably not  the best for us.

Now, where it works well for us is first cutting, where we have that massive amount of bales and you just need to get them out of the field and up to the barn, worked really well then. You could outstack trucks and trailers. When you get into second, third, fourth cutting where you don't have quite the number of bales, eh, it wasn't as good.

I, but overall happy with the purchase. Not, maybe doesn't fit our operation quite as well as I would like but happy with the purchase. It was not a bad value at all. In fact, I would, if we had a bunch of Big, big squares that, big square fields, then this thing would be perfect.

I would buy another one. The other thing we did, the other big change we made this year on the farm was we switched from we switched one of our lease tractors. We have a six, we had a 6155R John Deere.  And we our lease was up on that and the, and we switched that out for a 6R175, just a little bit more horsepower, but big difference in frame, much bigger frame, heavier.

All that. The thing we did wrong there is, and I don't know, and I guess that was our first piece of leased equipment ever.  And the thing that we did wrong wasn't the tractor, wasn't the dealer, wasn't the service, it was  our lease ended in June.  And I picked that tractor up in November, but the way they structured the paperwork and everything, that tractor had to be turned in June.

That's the middle of our season. And if you've ever dealt with this type of stuff, we had a sprayer monitor, we had the sprayer. There's it takes two boxes mounted in the cab for the sprayer. You've got the bale stacker, you've got the other equipment that you have to have in there.

You've got three or four boxes mounted in there. You've got all that wiring from those harnesses run through there. It's a it, it's a bit of a job to get all that set up and working right and the way you want it in the cab for the ergonomics and all of that kind of thing and run in the right way.

Here we are, they brought this, we had to swap this tractor out and  had to do it in the middle of the season. And that wasn't ideal. Now the tractor swap out. I'm for the most part, I'm happy with the change, the bigger is always better. But the tractor, I liked the new tractor.

We, we went from a power quad transmission to the new Ivy to the IVT. And I really like that, that trans, I like the IVT transmission, it works really well for us, and I've used it in most of our applications, it works well in the spraying side of things, so we have, we use a pull behind sprayer, we, self propelled sprayer, several hundred thousand dollars, we have a pull behind, so we run, we do all of our fertilization and our herbicides and pesticides and fungicides, We do all that with a pull behind and so this tractor with the guidance on it does our spraying.

It worked, that IVT transmission in the tractor worked really well. We pull a 1, 600 gallon sprayer. It worked really well. Had in an emergency, we had a, we had our 7250 go down for a little bit, so we had to put the baler on it. Did great. In field prep, so we have a Turbomax  VT. If you're not familiar with a VT, it's basically a soil, a seedbed prep tool.

Weighs about 12, 000 pounds. Ours is a 12 foot.  It takes, it was all it wanted with 155 horsepower. It was all it wanted to pull that with this new 175 pulls it much better. And it's a minimum till kind of tool. You, what we did was, what we do is if we're coming in after corn or soybeans, like we had several corn fields and several bean fields that were transitioning to alfalfa.

We can set this disc where it's only touching maybe an inch and a half of soil. So And it makes a nice seedbed where we have good soil to seed contact, and it does it in one pass. The downside is you have to run it, it really wants to run it,  8, 9 miles an hour. It'll actually tell you faster, but if you're pulling it at about 8 miles an hour,  When the faster you go, the more horsepower it takes.

And that one 55 at eight miles an hour, it would sorta, it ran out of ponies. And the one 75 was absolutely perfect. No problems pulling it whatsoever. And the IVT transmission was nice because you can really dial that speed in, really dial that speed. And so when you're coming in, it has the two, two not really a two stage, but you have two detents in your.

Your speed, so you can set your top speed of range 1 there to, 3. 2 miles an hour and then your high speed at maybe 5 miles an hour when you're pulling a roller. So we, our seeding process works differently than, we don't pull a seed or an actual seed drill. We prep our ground, make sure there's good soil to, soil for the seed to contact.

And then we either hire an air flow or a spreader truck to come in, spread our seed just on the surface of the dirt, and then we have a brilliant cultipacker  that we have two rollers. We have one's a 32 foot and one is a 22 foot, or 21 foot with a double roller. And that's the one we usually use. Then we roll that seed in, and we've found that to get that optimum depth and not too much, Get the, get the soil undulating there.

You want to run that about four miles an hour and not get much faster than that. And When you've got that IVT transmission, you can dial that in to exactly what you think the soil conditions will be, whether it's 4. 1, 4. 2, whatever it is, you can dial that in to exactly what you want.

That's been a nice change this year. I really I like that tractor. We, and I'll say another thing. The dealership we deal with, John Deere, I'll throw a little shout out to Side Stryker Nobi. They're our local John Deere dealer. They've been great to deal with on the service side. Had a problem with the setup of the tractor.

They know what it is. They're dealing with it internally, but the point of the matter is,  yes, there was a setup problem when, before they brought it to me.  But they came out and fixed it.  What more could you ask for? And they took responsibility for it. They fixed it. They're making, they've completely made it right.

So far, it's good. In fact, and that'll bring up the last major change that we're making on the farm coming out of this year  is we are switching balers. This is a huge deal for us.  We have run a Hestan 2250 3x3 baler, and the baler itself was great, and I'm not gonna trash a dealer because that's not my point.

From everything I've run after year one, I had a lot of problems with that baler in year one, and that's Those problems are fixed,  those problems that were happening in year one were fixed and so year two and three and  this baler has run impeccably. This year did not miss a knot, ran perfect. 

The challenge we have is the, and this is not a knock on this dealer. Don't get me wrong. I, we've had our words, the dealer and I have had our words together and I still deal with them. I still buy some parts from them from time to time. But I still. It's not that kind of a problem with them.

The problem is in an overall, the service guys there, no issues. They're good guys and they the guys in the trucks, they come out, they're good guys.  The challenge was they were, did not receive adequate or any training. And so the service was hunt and peck  and. If you understand how hay works, when that hay is on the ground, we have a matter of hours to get that off the ground and into a bale in ideal condition. 

If that baler doesn't work,  we're losing money every minute that baler doesn't work because as that hay sits out in the, sits out in the sun, as it gets rained on, as these things happen, that hay devalues.  And there is an optimum time to get that hay off the ground and  Even though this bailer was lawless for two years. 

There's nobody that knows how to fix it in our area. There's nobody that has adequate training. The guy who did, who does know how to fix it, and I love him. He is fantastic. His dealership is wonderful, and it, he's a good guy. I like him a lot.  But it's an hour and a half drive each way, so it's a three hour round trip to get the parts.

And he usually has parts on hand,  but, it's a three hour round trip and then you've got to figure out how to do it yourself because our local dealer has never, they've only sold, in the entire history of their dealership, they've only sold one big square baler, and that was the one we got, and they just didn't know what to look for.

This is not a, I'm not putting their dealership down or putting them down. They sold something they didn't know how to service  and it really hurt us first year.  Once I got it fixed, the baler did great, but drum roll, anyway, drum roll, we actually switched color balers. And if you listen to our podcast or, you've been around our farm, I'm not, I don't have a, I'm I don't care about the color of a tractor or my implements.

We switched to a John Deere L331 baler. Solely because of service.  The, having guys that know how to work on them. Having guys that have been to baler school. They know what these pro, what the issues are. They know how to fix them. I wouldn't, I probably would not have bought one of the 100 series balers.

It was a single knot baler. These double knot balers are,  They're a different machine,  but, we made the switch to a green baler and, we'll see how that goes. We don't get it until we're not completely done with this thing yet. But as far as I know, they're bringing the baler.  Oh, I think it was being trucked in last week and they'll start going through the process and they won't take our bail, our existing bailer until this one's up and running and making consistent bail.

So it's, it's  I'm excited about it because it's new and it'll be fun to see if it works, but it was more about feeling confident about having somebody in our local market here that can go come down and service that baler. Yep, that's the big news here on our big news this year is switching colors of balers. 

We, we run a John Deere round baler and have been very happy with it, and that's our cleanup baler. If we have a, if we have a field that has gotten a little ripe, or we have don't have, the quality of that field, we run out there with round baler. That's really our biggest change. I think the other thing we're going to work on, is organization.

We're going to try to get all of our servicing done this fall. Oil changes, hydraulics, filters, all of those type of service issues. We've got a couple of big repairs we have to make that we're going to try to get done this fall. So as we come into spring, we're ready to go even earlier than we were this year.

This year, we did all of our oil changes in the spring. Didn't get them done over the winter. But we're going to try to flip that and just keep pushing and get our get all of our service done. The other thing we're going to try to do next year is get better with our loading, try to find a couple of good hay trailers, hay wagons and try to, instead of having one trail, one big huge trailer running back and forth to the barn, have  three mid sized trailers that can be staged and a guy can run back to the barn while the other two are getting loaded, come back and get another trailer and just keep that cycle going.

I think that will help us getting in and out of the field's been our challenge, overall I'm pleased with 2024. I. After all of it, I still have a blast doing it. With that I'll let you go today. You have a wonderful, blessed day and we'll catch you in the next one.

Thanks for listening.