Organic Hay Production in the North?

[Jan Flora]

Hey Folks:

I'm trying to find anything I can about growing grass hay with organic methods in the far north. If any of you stumble across something, please holler. Our fertilizer prices went from $400/ton to $1060/ton in one year. We don't have the dough. Our wages didn't go up any. We need 15 ton.

We can't use fishmeal on a perennial crop. We'd draw every grizzly bear in the neighborhood. Our neighbor who composts dead fishes and peat draws so many bears that he's become a roadside attraction. He's chumimng the bears into our neighborhood, and we're not really happy about it.

Is anyone in Canada doing organic grass hay???

Thanks,

Jan in Alaska beef cattle rancher 59N, 151W.

[phorbin]

My wife suggested contacting:

Laura Telford the director of Canadian Organic Growers [e-mail]

The Rodale Institute

Mother Earth News.

COG will probably be your best bet to network into people who are already doing it. With any luck, you'll find someone nearer your latitude.

If there's an equivalent organic growers association where you are (and you may have already tried and found them lacking in useful info.) that's the place to ask your question too.

...and I don't know about anyone else, but my wife and I will be very interested in how you do with this. --It never occurred to me that people put fertilizer on hay. (...second generation city kid, me. My granparents were farm kids who moved to the city.)

[Jan Flora]

This is exactly the info I was hoping for -- the Canadian Organic Growers. I had no idea they existed.

The one problem with Canadian hay farmers is that in the west, we own the coast. In the east, I don't know if anyone is growing hay. But it's well worth talking to those folks anyway, as they are at the same latitude as us, so they'll have information that we can use, as we both have cold soils, hard winters, short growing seasons and stuff like that in common.

Thanks!!

Jan, in coastal Alaska eight months of winter, four months of piss-poor sledding 59N, 151W

[Billy]

Jan, in the blur of the posts that have gone by, someone (hopefully someone will help me out, if I put my foot through it here) mentioned harvesting after the first frost in order to reduce the amount of weeds in the baled product. With that idea held firmly in mind, is there any way you could sprinkle some nitrogen fixers amoung your crop, so that they could be renewing the nitrogen in the soil, while you grow your crop?

Just an idea.

Oh, and thanks for the heads up on the bumper sticker. I should have mine in about five weeks.

Sorry to hear about your sledding. Global warming won't be a good deal for that, there on the Homer Riviera;o)

[Jan Flora]

We have a bunch of clover growing in our hay meadows. We aren't plagued with noxious or invasive weeds on the meadows (touch wood), so we don't spray any poisons. (We wouldn't spray anyway. We'd use other methods to kill the weeds.) Most of our meadows are certified "weed free." We're going to rebreak and replant some of the meadows after haying them this year. (They're 60 year old meadows that have never been rebroke. We've got soil compaction and poor production in a few spots. This will be a prime opportunity to transition to organic, at least on a few meadows.)

Billy, we're darn lucky to get good quality, dry hay baled in July and August here, although one desperate year, we finished baling-out the night before the first snow hit in October. Some years, it rains all summer and we have a hell of a time getting the hay to dry enough to bale it. First frost comes sometime in very early September. Last frost was about two weeks ago. (No one plants the garden until June 1, earliest.)

But I can see snowcapped mountains and glaciers from my window here. The scenery is lovely : )

Jan