Northern Michigan is dealing with a hay shortage.
That’s a particular challenge for small-scale farmers like Heather Greenwald, who relies on the food source for her animals year-round.
Greenwald and her wife run Stonewall Acres, a micro-scale garden and livestock farm in Blair Township, south of Traverse City. They keep chickens, goats, horses, and cattle. All those animals eat a lot.
But their 10-acre plot doesn’t have enough grass to feed all those animals, and they don’t have enough land to grow their own hay.
So Greenwald supplements her pastures with hay in the summer and is almost entirely dependent on it to feed her animals in the winter.
Early signs of a spring drought this year made Greenwald worry.
“When it got to be the third week of May … I said, ‘It’s going to be a bad hay season,’ and I started looking to buy in bulk,” said Greenwald.
Greenwald found a farmer with leftover stockpiles from last season, and decided to order her hay needs for the entire year in one go.
She says that move cost her thousands of dollars up front, but it’s been worth it. She paid the farmer’s asking price from last year, about $60 per bale, instead of some of the $70 to $85 rates she’s seeing now.
Bad weather means hay yields have dropped this year, and prices have soared, especially in the Greenwalds’ neck of the woods.
Kim Cassida is a forages and cover crops specialist at Michigan State University.
“Up in the northern part of the state … local hay supplies are short,” said Cassida. “The biggest problem earlier was drought … so when it is too dry, the hay doesn’t grow … So our first cut was pretty low across the state.”
That first cut of hay is usually in early summer.
But now, as farmers try to make their second cut, Cassida says there’s another problem.
“We did finally get a little rain coming in, so in many parts of the state right now, we're actually getting pretty good growth on the hay,” she said. “But the problem that farmers are really running into now is it keeps raining on it and they can't get it dry.”
Cassida says four days of dry weather is ideal for cutting, drying, and baling hay, but farmers in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula — where many forage crops are grown — are having a tough time with the weather.
Heather Greenwald is already thinking ahead to next year.
She says stockpiling hay like she did this year isn’t a sustainable solution to what she believes could become a chronic problem. So she’s turning to other fixes, like sectioning up her small 10-acre farm into micro pastures.
The goal is to rotate her animals around more often. If they graze in one small pasture for a few days, then switch to another, it gives the grass a chance to come back.
And more live grass to eat means lower hay costs.
But with so little land, Greenwald says she’ll need to do a bit of cow shuffling to give the grass enough time to regenerate from their stomping and grazing.
“Next year, all five of our cattle will go together ... to the pasture that I'm building right now down in Kingsley,” said Greenwald.
The cattle will go munch on another farmer’s field for about a month, cutting the grass to a better height for the farm's resident pigs.
After that, they’ll come back to Stonewall Acres for a bit. Then Greenwald will shuttle them up to her family’s land in the U.P. for the rest of the summer.
She says that dance should alleviate about four months’ worth of hay needs, and they’ll keep doing that if it works.
“We're trying to get independent of [hay] to a certain degree in order to not have our whole bottom line dependent on what the cost of hay will be in a year,” Greenwald said.
Cassida, the specialist at MSU, says having grazing plans like these is one way farmers can weather future troubles with hay.
“You can do that no matter how small you are," she said. "You just have to have a plan for how you're going to divide it up. And it really does make a remarkable difference in how much utilization you'll get out of the forage that you have.”
Cassida says in bad hay years, there’s other options too. Farmers can sell more cattle off for beef; supplement feed with grain or other substitutes; or find nearby farmers who have forage but no livestock graze it, on sites like the Midwest Grazing Exchange.
The idea is that, increasingly, farmers will have to try a mix of approaches to stay nimble in an era when farming itself is becoming less predictable.
