Pete Kanaris has a pair of good videos on Jim Kovaleski’s haying by hand.
First, the scything:
And then, the baling:
I can’t find plans for the hay baler he’s using, but it’s ingenious.
Then again, so is this:
I once followed a baler through the field with my Aunt Karen and my cousins. It’s hard work throwing hay around and my allergies hated it, but it was amazing to see how it was done.
Jim Kovaleski notes that his scything and baling can be done even in wet fields where a tractor would bog down. You also don’t have the noise of a tractor or the expense. It’s good to know these things for the “just in case,” and to have good hand tools available as backups. If need be, I could feed the goats and cows with hand-baled hay; however, at roughly 30 minutes of work per bale, it would be a tough row to hoe. Or scythe and rake, as the case may be.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
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Off topic – video re: feral chickens in South Florida:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g02noyEFZeA&ab_channel=IGUANAMAN
Awesome.
Jim is the scythe savant!
He is really amazing.
You are talking about scything oat for your cattle, one of the things they are doing in Paraguay for the small dairy farmers is suggesting they sprout their feed corn and add it in to the mangers for the cattle. Some of the smaller dairy farmers don’t have lots of grazing land, and the move is to get the cattle indoors and away from the mud for the better quality milk
From what I saw from videos they are pouring small flat concrete pads with rims, and dumping in the feed corn and letting it sprout and grow a good 6″ and then feeding to the cows. The cows seemed to appreciate it.
Not sure how useful this is for you today, or this Summer, but it might be useful if you grow your own corn in the future or the cost of feed corn is not so high
I could see sprouted corn being much better for them.
I love Jim Kovaleski – he’s like the zen master of scything. It’s on my wish list to get a good quality scythe, for the “just in case” scenario, as you say. His philosophy about the meditative value of the slow work, and getting intimately familiar with the land, as well as his “itinerant farmer” lifestyle, living out of a tent for half the year while earning his keep scything people’s fields, then market gardening on suburban lawns in Florida for the other half of the year, is all very romantic and I just love the idea of it.
But it’s also very inefficient in terms of time. I generally prefer hand tools to power tools (just on principle and for aesthetic reasons), and I agree that tractors and other gas-powered machinery probably do a lot of damage to the land…but I have to confess, when you have a family, a homestead, livestock, and gardens that all need daily attention, and you also need to mow a field, it’s hard to beat a lawnmower.
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