Haying Means Big Business in North Park

If you have spent time in the mountains of northern Colorado, you have probably seen your fair share of wildlife. In some places you might have even seen herds of cattle or even horses grazing in the fields alongside the highways. But in the late summer months, you might have gotten a chance to see something else happening in those fields. Large pieces of heavy equipment look like they are mowing the grass and sticking it into blocks. In North Park, this process is an integral part of our thriving agricultural industry, and we’re here to tell you more about it.

Colorado isn’t just a destination for outdoor recreation, ski resorts, and adventure sports. Throughout the Centennial State, you’ll discover that a large percentage of our rural landscape is dedicated to agriculture. Along the Front Range and the Western Slope, you’ll find millions of acres dedicated to everything from dairies to potatoes, tomatoes, melons, corn, and just about anything you can find in your grocery store’s produce section.

In higher elevations, the growing season is much shorter, and the glacial soil left over from the last ice age makes large-scale vegetable production difficult, if not impossible. Public lands allow for ranchers to graze cattle, sheep, and other meat animals on BLM and National Forest lands. Those grassy fields that stretch out for miles along river bottoms mean a lucrative enterprise for some intrepid ranchers, and the hay produced in North Park has earned itself a worldwide reputation.
 

What is Hay?

Hay isn’t a type of plant so much as it is what can be produced out of a wide range of different forage plants. Many types of hay are grown throughout the world, produced from things such as alfalfa, legumes, corn stalks, wheat, barley, and many others. In the mountains of Colorado, the majority of hay produced in North Park comes from timothy grass. 

Timothy grass is prized for its durability to grow in extreme climates as well as its high nutritional value as forage. The thin atmosphere at altitude puts timothy grass in a favorable position when it comes to reduced loss of viability due to the harshness of UV radiation. It grows to around 3-4 ft. high before it is ready to be harvested. With the hot July-August afternoons bringing cooling rains, the window for cutting and harvesting can be very narrow.

The process of haying starts with cutting or mowing the grass when it is ready to harvest. This usually occurs in late summer. Harvesting can be done before, during, or after the timothy grass has “bloomed.” The time it is cut will determine all sorts of factors having to do with nutrition, durability, and how much processing needs to be done.

Why is Hay Important?

The hay is used to feed livestock—and even household pets—and contains digestible proteins, fiber, essential vitamins and minerals, and converts to usable carbohydrates in the gut of grazing animals. Hay—especially timothy grass hay—is an important feed because it produces very little bloat during digestion and can be stored for long periods of time without losing much nutritional value. An added benefit of timothy grass hay is that it has a consistent value because it isn’t a byproduct of grains or grasses harvested for human consumption. It serves one purpose—animal feed. Unless someone decides to try to make a craft beer out of it one day.

An added benefit of growing hay is in how little impact it has on the land. Where other types of hay might require extensive irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers, timothy grass is resilient. In spring and early summer, ranchers use flood irrigation on their hay meadows. The seeds from previous years germinate and grow quickly under the thin atmosphere of these mountain fields. The ditches are turned off after a few weeks and the grass can continue to grow with minimal irrigation, usually from a few feeder ditches or summer rainfall.

Enriching the soil comes from either spreading manure from livestock, or allowing cattle to graze in the wintertime on cut hay fields. Grazing cattle are often fed with a portion of the hay crop from the previous year to help them endure the harsh cold and snow. It’s a highly sustainable cash crop that brings millions of dollars to ranchers in North Park each year.
 

How Is Hay Harvested?

The grass can be cut with a sickle-bar mower and left to lie out in the summer sun to “cure”, or it can be mowed with a piece of equipment such as a swather, which will crush the stalks and leaves of the grass to extract moisture and deposit them into a windrow with one machine. Otherwise, mowed hay will need to be raked into windrows so it can continue to cure.

A delicate balance of moisture needs to be maintained. Too wet and the hay can mold and cause health problems for livestock. Too dry, and the digestible energy of the hay will be greatly reduced. It will also crumble into dust and be totally useless.

When the hay is cured, a machine called a baler follows the windrows and compresses the grass into round or square hay bales. These cubes and rounds are tied with twine or wire for easier transport or storage. 

Bales can range in size and weight, from 20 lb square bales and larger to large cylindrical bales weighing around a ton. Depending on the market and how the hay will be sold and later used determines the preferred method of baling.

Once the hay is baled, it is collected and either shipped out of North Park by truck or stacked and stored for local ranch use in haystacks. The hay is loaded onto trailers or hay wagons, sometimes with skis or wheels to feed cattle in the winter.

Hay that is sold off and transported is tested for nutritional values such as digestible energy, protein content, moisture, and other indexes so it can be graded and sold in the feed market. Hay purity is also important, since some weeds and native plants can be toxic to livestock, which also affects the grade of the hay. North Park has the benefit of being a prime location for timothy grass cultivation and growth, while not having the problem of too many noxious species of plants getting into the mix. How it ranks in RFV, or Relative Feed Value, against other harvesters at a hay market will determine its value at auction.

Early Haying Practices

Early ranchers who needed the forage to support their herds during the wintertime hayed their fields a little differently. Fields could be mowed with hand scythes and later horse-drawn mower wagons. The hay was raked into piles and pushed up tall log ramps to where it would fall into stack yards. These types of haystacks are sometimes called sugarloaf stacks. Throughout the winter they would be used to feed cattle.

Up until recent years, some ranches in North Park were still using horses and sugarloaf stacks to put up their hay. Though the practice seems outdated, it actually had surprisingly low environmental impact since very little fossil fuels were being used in the hay harvest. It was also fascinating to watch these hundred year old methods of haying put into action. The skills and technique needed to harvest fields in this way is quickly disappearing, and one day might only be something you read about in books.

Locals Working the Hay Fields

During the summer months, it isn’t just rodeos and outdoor festivals in North Park. many locals find employment in the hay fields, helping with the hay harvest. Some start youn, often learning how to operate farm equipment before they are old enough to get a driver’s license. In the early days of North Park, school years were centered around agriculture, making sure that school started after haying season so that ranching families would have enough workers to bring in the hay crop.

Even today, young and old alike participate in bringing in the hay crop, with a large percentage of the local young adults making money in summer jobs working the hay fields. The work can entail long hours, monotonous days under the July and August sun, swatting mosquitoes and horseflies for several weeks until the job is done.

Elite Feed for Elite Animals from a One of a Kind Place

Since North Park hay has one crop per year, it has gathered a reputation for being some of the best hay in the United States. Local ranchers have sold to race horse stables in Kentucky as well as stables throughout the world for premium fodder. The high protein levels, digestible energy, and nutritional quality are what high-performance athletes such as race horses require. Even with the added expense of transporting the hay out of Jackson County, North Park hay is worth it. 

Livestock producers throughout Colorado and the rest of the US buy North Park hay for cattle and other animal feed. Pure, clean water, air, and soil that is allowed to be replenished naturally is extremely sustainable. Fertilizers and additives aren’t going into the ground water, and with only one crop possible during North Park’s short growing season, the hay still packs a punch with its high nutritional values.
 

A Deeper Cut into North Park Culture

So next time you are driving through North Park on a road trip in the Colorado mountains, you’ll have a better idea what is going on in those grassy fields along the highways. North Park has a long history and strong tradition of agricultural practices in spite of short growing seasons and harsh winters. The hay we grow in this out of the way mountain valley has reached all around the world and to those who are in the know, it has gotten a much deserved reputation for being an elite feed.