Can't do this without it--six months of winter really is a thing.

I wonder how many hours per year we've spent talking about hay. Smelling hay, soaking hay for the horses, adding it to nest boxes and runs for insulation, lifting hay, stacking hay, watching happy sheep munch hay (after they baaaa incessantly and you throw them a few flakes, they grab a big bite and then look at you with happy faces while chewing manically) It's instantly happy-making.

Raked and trying to dry on a cold (13 C) day with rain forecast for the night.  Luckily this field is up on a hill and gets plenty of wind.

Where are we going to put all the hay from our field?? G the jenga expert to the rescue!

Part of the stack before adding 196 of our own bales! 

Custom haying turned out to be very cheap. For all of this is was only ~ $250.  At regular hay prices this would have cost us around $1300.  Normally they have a 5 acre minimum, but since their own hay fields were nearby, and we bought 100 bales from them they made an exception.  He thought it was about 3 acres worth. Oh and that's a 105 HP tractor, with a New Holland square baler with that amazing hydraulic bale thrower--he could adjust it to throw certain distances to fill the cart properly!  Very cool.  VERY expensive farm equipment.

While unloading and stacking and restacking hay this past month, G did the math on it (of course). He figured with the number of times he'd lifted each bale (picture up the giant stack, one by one, up to the hayloft etc) he'd lifted somewhere in the range of 25 000-30 000 pounds of hay in only a few days.  Then the night the farmer left us with the full cart plus the 20 or so bales we had to drive out and collect ourselves I lifted somewhere in the 8000 pound range.  Seems crazy, doesn't it?  No wonder farm kids grow up so strong.  G and I used to lift pretty heavy in the gym when we were training for track cycling, but even that was nothing compared to several hours of climbing up giant stacks, lifting and throwing bales almost as tall as me.  Humbling, for sure. But we love it.

We now have a huge weight off of our shoulders.  Close to 500 bales should do it.  That allows a little extra for any extremely cold days when we need to feed more, and for a wet spring that won't allow us to get the beasts out there. 'Be prepared' never had so much meaning until we moved here and started doing all of this.  And we're not even off grid! Consider this training for the future.