But 500 acres is not their best day, says hay supervisor Mike Boyle. They cut 560 acres in one day during the 2013 harvest.
A single year will produce 45,000 to 55,000 tons of hay, depending on rotations and climate at the two ranches, located in Alturas and Madeline.
With about 12,000 acres of hay to harvest each year, and two to three cuttings per season, the swathers aren’t the only implements running at full throttle.
It also takes six rakes, 10 balers, five harrow beds and a four-man trucking crew, in addition to the farm development and irrigation crews.
While the baling supervisor, the rake supervisor, the harrow bed supervisor and the swather supervisor are long-term year-round employees, Boyle also hires a fair number of local temporary summer helpers.
Using a few inexperienced workers to achieve a goal of 500 acres per day is not without challenges. Boyle says, “I try to use high school kids or young college kids; I like those kids on the balers and swathers.
Once I start losing them back to school, then our irrigation people are starting to free up, so we can use them to finish the hay.
I’m looking for the kids who are wanting to do something with themselves. They’re inexperienced – some of them don’t even know how to drive a manual transmission and use a clutch.
We have to have patience and teach them, but it’s kinda neat to see them progress. For a lot of them it’s the first job they’ve ever had.”
While as much of the hay as possible is raised for dairy quality, rain events on 12,000 acres are, of course, inevitable.
Stopping six rakes, 10 balers and the remaining train of equipment is enough to turn a hay supervisor’s stomach, says Boyle, and getting the train moving again is just as difficult.
For that reason, Boyle says, “We just can’t look up at the sky. We just gotta keep going because if we schedule around a rain event, you’re gonna miss days you could have gone and you’re gonna waste a lot of time. We keep going until the rain starts hitting the windshield.
You gotta go. We know we’re gonna get some hay rained on, and that’s a fact of life. I got a smartphone this year that shows weather forecasts, and I don’t like it. If it rains, you quit, and if it’s not raining, you go.”
The hay that does not meet dairy-quality standards can be run through the pellet mill at the Alturas location. Boyle says, “We offer sun-cured alfalfa pellets and guarantee 15 percent crude protein – that’s what we have to hit. And color sells; they have to be green.
You can blend the lower-quality hay to some extent to green up the color or hit the protein. If we have a pest problem or other problems, or see something that shouldn’t go into a stack, we can blend that to produce the pellets.”
No additives are blended with pellet hay. Only steam is used to help extrude the hay through the mill. Pellets are sold in bulk by the truckload to companies up and down the West Coast, who then mix and blend it for specialty feeds for rabbits, horses and other animals.
Baling hay is an art, and each artist uses different strokes. Boyle describes his strokes: “We cut four passes around the outside of the field to open it up.
Three or four days later, I turn the ends over on the fields that they’ll rake the next night because when they’re turning swathers around you usually run over hay; so I turn them up. I don’t combine the rows; I just turn them up and fluff them so they dry a little better and we don’t have slugs on the ends.”
Boyle adds, “I think one of the most important things to do when haying is to make sure you’re cutting when the ground is dry to help with drying, and then you don’t have regrowth coming up before you get the hay off, which is putting moisture back in the windrows. It’s a fight between the hay crew and the irrigation crew all the time.”
The annual production at Alturas Ranches is 45,000 to 46,000 tons, although tonnage has been as high as 55,000. Being some distance from most hay markets, most of the hay is sold through hay brokers or through contracts with BLM horse facilities.
California trucking regulations are restrictive, and complying is expensive, so Alturas Ranches delivers to the local customer base but does not generally travel further than Reno, Nevada.
A cattle ranch, another enterprise of owner Barry Swenson, also grazes the meadows and consumes a portion of the meadow hay and alfalfa hay.
The latest hay technology Boyle is excited about is the Staheli West Dewpoint steamer, purchased and used for the first time in California at Alturas Ranches in 2013.
The machine attaches immediately behind the tractor, producing and injecting steam into the windrow as it feeds into the baler. Without the steamer, the balers must wait for dew, reducing the window of opportunity.
Boyle says, “It’s allowed us to put up a better-quality hay and has allowed us to increase the percentage of big bales that we do compared to small bales.
For big bales, we don’t have to wait for the dew. If the ambient temperature gets about 95 degrees, we have to stop baling even with the steamer because the internal temperature of the bale gets too hot. You can only add so much steam to it.
We only have to shut down for a few hours in the afternoon when it’s really hot, and then from when the dew maybe gets too wet until the sun comes up and burns off a little moisture.” Boyle claims the steamer has enabled them to move from using four large balers to only two.
In addition to but in conjunction with the steamer, Alturas Ranches also invested in the Gazeeka moisture sensor, which is installed on the baler.
Using microwave technology, the moisture sensor reads moisture levels through the entire bale. Boyle says the transition wasn’t easy and has taken some getting used to.
“It’s been a whole change in the big baling process with the steamer because I can go with my hand probe and it’ll read 22 to 23 percent with the traditional probe, and the Gazeeka will be telling me it’s 16 to 17 percent.
But if you go back to the same bale the next day and check it again with the hand probe, it’ll read the same as what the Gazeeka told you at 16 to 17 percent. So it’s really spooky to go right behind the steamer with the hand probe; it scares you to death thinking this stuff is going to explode.
But when you check it a day or two later it’s right there where the Gazeeka said it was. It’s amazing,” says Boyle.
With the tractor, the steamer, the baler and the accumulator, the train measures 70 feet end-to-end. Boyle says it tows and follows remarkably well. He should know – it’s 33 miles from the shop at the Madeline location to the shop at Alturas, and many of the fields are also portioned 20-acre parcels to accommodate flood irrigation and wild-rice paddy rotations.
Boyle says the wild rice rotations have helped them survive fluctuations in the hay market. They’ve tried several rotation crops, including garlic, corn, grain, onions and sudan-sorghum hybrids. With plenty of water from wells and the Pit River, they have many options to work with.
As Boyle gives me a tour of the beautiful ranch at the Alturas location sporting a private reservoir covered with ducks and geese, and green fields dotted with antelope among the hay bales, Boyle makes the understatement of the year, “It’s a pretty piece of real estate. It’s neat to work on an outfit of this magnitude.” FG
PHOTO
Using only steam and alfalfa, the pellet mill at Alturas Ranches produces sun-cured pellets at 15 percent crude protein, adding marketing opportunities throughout California. Photo by Lynn Jaynes.
