Mt. Nusatsum

Mt. Nusatsum

Monday, July 9, 2012

Hay

With the wet cool spring we had and just enough warm days thrown in, its been good for grass growing.  There is lots of nice, rich looking hay coming off fields today after 5 or so days of good weather.  A couple farmers I talked to have commented about the good growth this year in fields that were inundated with flood waters from the Great Flood of 2010.  If you are a longer term reader of the  bellacoolablog.com you will remember the extreme 1 in 200 year flood of September 2010.  There are only a handful of hay fields in the valley that didn't have some level of water on them and the siltation load from that flood was extreme, plus it seemed to be a relatively rare event where we got a ton of silt out of the Atnarko River drainage which has it's headwaters well east of the Coast Range of Mountains and in a totally different geologically formed area likely with different minerals and nutrients.   While I don't have any data to make my point, the silt is what makes alluvial flood plains over time and most alluvial flood plains are where the best farming areas in BC are (Fraser Valley, Kootenay River Valley, Nechako River, Peace River being a few). Grizzly


3 comments:

  1. I've seen the big large bales in the fields. I always wonder how they get stacked and how they are used. I used to have a horse and bought bales of hay, one at a time. I could move it with a dolly and pull off a flake for each meal. That sure wouldn't work with a big roll. - Margy

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  2. Those are 1100 pound bales, give or take. You feed them out with a tractor and a spear to lift them. And with a pitch fork, it just kind of unrolls and falls off, as you make a few piles out the bale. You can feed one of these bales a day for 30 head or so. Cattle eat 30 lbs a day roughly. A maturing, weaned calf, 20 lbs. Much easier than working with those "primitive" little square bales!

    Would this photo be in Firvale on the North Side?

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