As snow falls and winter descends, a lot of agricultural work is slowing down. But for farmers with livestock, they’ve got to make sure their animals have enough to eat through the long cold months.
In late December, Sugar House Creamery stacked their last shipment of hay for the season.
It was a sunny, frigid morning at the farm as I waited with the owners, Alex Eaton and Margot Brooks, for the hay to arrive.
"It's going to be about 630 bales of hay," explained Eaton, "in tiny little square bales. Well, not so tiny," he laughed. "They're like 40-50 pound square bales."
"We're going to put it in our barn. We'll feed it out all winter to our 12 dairy cows," said Brooks, the resident cheesemaker.
The couple had already stacked two deliveries of hay in the loft of their barn earlier in December and November.
For their daughter Harriet, it was a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning. She was a ball of energy bundled up in winter gear. When I asked what we were doing today, she said, "putting hay up the hay elevator, of course!"
The hay arrived on two trailers pulled by trucks. The square bales were stacked high and were uncovered; the clear day was lucky.
Kyle LaBare drove one of the trucks. He hays over 800 acres of land in Chateaugay. "We made 112,000 small square bales this year," said LaBare. "Mostly for horses, and most of our hay goes all over the Northeast, New Hampshire [and] Massachusetts mostly."
Sugarhouse Creamery is one of LaBare's handful of local buyers. As he loosened the rachet straps holding the hay to the trailer, Alex Eaton plugged in the grain elevator.
Five adults, plus Harriet, climbed up the ladder and into the haymow. Harriet climbed up onto the barn’s crossbeams. The rest of us got ready to receive the square bales, standing on the squishy floor of previously stacked hay, which was about seven feet high.
"The whole objective is just to make each layer as solid and not hole-filled as possible," explained Eaton, "because we're going to be walking on it. So you just fill in a layer and then work on the next layer and just pack the bales in as tightly as possible."
Labare and his partner started tossing square bales onto the grain elevator. They shook their way up to Eaton, who stood at the top end of the machine, and tossed the bales back towards the rest of us as they fell off the elevator.
"It's kind of like Tetris, a little bit," said Eaton. "You have to put them sideways, sometimes you turn them 90 degrees. But also if you take too long to think about where you're putting the hay bale, then you get in the weeds and the bales start adding up and you’re in big trouble," he laughed.
The bales were heavy and bulky. To muscle them into place, you pick them up by grabbing onto the twine that binds them together. Margot Brooks has done this for many years and makes it look easy.
"I love stacking hay. It's kind of like stacking wood." she said. "You know, you're like putting away the summer's work." She said as she stacks, she likes to think "about the field that the hay came out of and the labor that went into cutting it."
Brooks explained that what they stacked previously was 'first cutting' hay. That's the first round of hay harvested from LaBare's fields. What we’re stacking is second-cutting.
"It's a lot more leafy and green and colorful," said Brooks. "And it's where all the protein is. When we feed out the mix of the two hays, there’s the fiber, which is important for the health of the cows’ rumen, and then they get all the protein from the second cutting, which is what we're going to make milk on."
It’s was just above 13 degrees out while we were stacking, and we were in the shade of the barn.
But we quickly stripped off our coats and hats and even gloves.
The hay kept coming, and we stacked layer after layer of hay, getting closer and closer to the barn ceiling.
I asked Eaton what his technique was to throw hundreds of bales of hay, and not throw his back out. He laughed and said, "I think I probably do throw my back out!" He said he'd definitely be sore later, but that you get into the groove and the urgency as bales come up the elevator and need to be moved.
"It’s also super satisfying to fill this barn with food for our cows like that. That is like such a gratifying thing to me," he said.
