Making hay is all about caring for the land, precise timing, and hard work!
At the heart of our farm is a family-scale haying operation that allows us to provide high quality organic forage to our goat herd through Vermonts’ long winter months. Our cost to feed the herd is very low in dollars but high in labor during the summer. We do all the work as a family along with help from friends and neighbors who want to keep these traditions alive in our community. We make dry square bales with a collection of older, used equipment I like to call “The Rag-Tag Fleet”. Repairs are often high stress events when there is hay down and rain in the forecast. Vermonts’ fickle weather, particularly in the early summer, does not allow more than a few days to put down the hay, dry it and bring it in. We spend the summer listening to the weatherman and “making hay when the sun shines”.
The result of this labor of love is exceptional quality organic forage at a price measured in sweat not dollars.
Our composting operation converts the winter bedded pack from the goats, a mixture of manure, straw, biochar and hay into rich compost for feeding the hungry soil microbes in the hay fields and garlic beds. Everything goes back on the land in a regenerative cycle that improves our soil instead of depleting it.
