Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Free hay!

I'm not sure if I’ve mentioned where I work before, but I work for a large family farm as an accounting assistant/receptionist. It is a farm run by a father and his 4 boys. They grow wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarbeets and potatoes. They don’t grow potatoes up in this area anymore because the ground just isn’t good for them, but they still grow them at their farm that is a bit further south. When they were growing them up here we took a field trip out to see them being harvested and we got to take home a HUGE bag of fresh potatoes. I thought that was the best day ever. That is until yesterday.

One of my bosses, the father, came into the office in the morning and I had asked him about sugarbeet pulp, since we started feeding it to Pistol because I want him to bulk up a bit. I asked if there was any way one could buy some beet pulp from the plant which is just down the road from our office. He said they do have it for sale but you have to buy it from someone else but he would get me the information. He then asked me if I had found hay. I said that we had found some small square bales, and that my husband’s father was having his land bailed and that we were planning on going out west to pick it up sometime this fall when we had some time. He then said well if you want them I have 8 round bales that I had saved for you. How awesome is that? I had been a little nervous about hay this winter, mostly because it was so dry around here this year that no one has hay for sale. And the stuff that is for sale is being snatched up and sent down south.  These 8 bales will definitely be put to good use! SO thankful for the free hay! They had 4 bales loaded up on a trailer of his for me, and even let me borrow one of the work pickup trucks. It was a Chevy, which was pretty hard for me to drive. Only because it was a Chevy, I wasn’t brought up to drive THAT kind of vehicle ;-)  We will pick up the remaining bales tonight after work!

10 comments:

  1. Free hay is awesome! I hope your ponies actually want to eat it - whenever I get cheap (good quality, fantastic smelling, clean) hay, they never want to eat it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fatso, I mean Duke will eat anything, He's been eyeing the bales ever since we brought them home. He kept calling out to us when we were unloading them like "hey jerks! That goes INSIDE the fence with me!"

      Delete
  2. yeah free hay!!! that is awesome!!! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is super awesome! Now I am hinting that maybe we can support another hungry mouth this winter and a trip out to my OTTB guy is in order :-)

      Delete
  3. I really enjoy your blog, and am so glad about the hay! I have a question, it may be a sensitive one, I'm not sure, but in the spirit of educating myself I'd like to ask:

    May I ask about the soy, corn and sugar beets? Do you know if they are GMO? I am so interested in this issue, and have learned that these three crops are usually GMO. Most other countries have banned GMO's, but since Monsanto is an American company, of course it hasn't happened here yet.

    Vote YES on Prop 37 if you are in California, to make labeling mandatory of GMO "foods".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi there, the seed that my bosses grow is genetically modified. The way I look at it is this way. The world’s population is growing by leaps and bounds every single day. This is causing valuable farm land to disappear every day, in order to make room for the bigger population. Farmers need to be able to feed/clothe/fuel/etc the bigger population on smaller amounts of farmland. So obviously their crops need to yield maximum amounts in order to do so. The plants need to be stronger and be able to resist more factors such as drought and diseases. Seed that is not engineered to do so would not be able to stand up to the demand the world has for it. The part of the world that I live in has some of the best farmland in the entire world but we have pretty intense weather. Some springs are pretty wet the farmers don’t get into their fields until late in the spring. In this case their crops need to be able to mature and grow in a shorter amount of time in order to be harvested before we get our mountains of snow. While Corn can be harvested in the snow or even in early spring, soybeans, and sugarbeets cannot. I am really not the best person to ask about this sort of thing, but this is what I understand about using genetically modified seed. I understand where some people are coming from when they are opposed to gmo seed, but I also see it from the growers point of view.

      Delete
    2. Yes, I understand the logic of the growers side, but I am so concerned that those of us in the near future who do not want to ingest this food will have no choice, due to seed spread that is beyond the control of the growers. There are so many legit studies coming out of Russia and Germany that show GMO linking with other genetic mutations of those that consume them.

      Any "food" product which has the companies who use it spending millions to prevent labeling just cannot be safe.

      I am so grateful for your sincere reply, I am just concerned that while there is a problem of overpopulation, we as a species tend to only go with the most profitable solution, instead of the safest long term.

      Delete
    3. Also, my heart does go out to the plight of the farmers...so many of us in large cities just "expect" food to be there, in the store, exactly how we want it.

      It's a very tough situation.

      About two years ago I read that alfalfa was something like the first GMO crop, and I literally cried thinking I would most likely not be able to have the freedom to choose to feed my horse organic alfalfa in the future (due to uncontrollable seed spread aka contamination). It made me so angry.

      Delete
  4. Hey wonderful news about the hay ...always nice to have plenty away in the barn!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. With the lack of hay this year we are so thankful to have it! I was starting to work on plans on what we could feed the horses if we ran out of hay!

      Delete