profitable hay

The hay business is starting to pick up a little around home. Got a customer comin this morning but had to let dad handle it as I'm at the parts counter right now. Makes it hard to run a hay business when you're 30 miles from the barn. But I gotta pay bills so the parts job has to stay. Anyway, after the year I've had with my baler breaking down (and stil not fixed), my main power source tractor still in the shop (waiting for warmer weather so I can plug a leak with liquid glass), and the weather problems I had; I've been thinkin awful hard about how I'm going to make this hay business profitable. I'd like to expand but I don't know how to go about it with my job keepin me away from 7am till 5:45pm and 7-12:45 on Saturdays it is hard to get stuff done. I'm hoping to invest in a haybine come spring but don't know any good ways to fight the S. OH summer weather. Last year I put over 600lb of fertilizer to the acre on one field. I still haven't finished bush hogging what would have been the first cutting on half of that field. The wet spring kept me out and by the time it did dry there were big stalky weeds maturing in it. That ruined most of what I cut off of it and it isn't selling well. I know that moving to a haybine will do a big favor since my neighbor put in great hay this year and I lost most of mine to rain. I'm not in a financial position to heavily invest in fert., equip., and labor but want to expand so this hay business is more than just a hobby to eat money and tear up equipment. Guess I need to diversify into goats ha ha! Any ideas for a poor guy with old equipment who wants to keep the latter part the same? God bless.

--old fashioned farmer

Teddy

I couldnt do now what I did at 20 to make it work. Spend 30 hrs a week at class, another 20 working for someone, and at least 40 hrs a week farming. Cant reacll eating except in the cab of the truck or on the tractor. Summers, when I could make money hiring a custom operator to do something I did. I had people do my hay on shares while I did custom batwinging (if the economics were right). I tried to make sure I worked at it every day until dark, then went to the shop and worked on my junk. Paint is cheap and adds a lot of value. I'd fix up what ever piece of junk I was using, paint it that winter, sell it and try to buy something a little better with the profit. For 15 years I tried to put everything I made in the hay busineess back into the hay business; took a third of my paycheck to pay off the farm plus all the cow profits. It took time, and I hated being poor.

Things got better after about 10 years, farm was paid off, had pretty decent equipment by that time, and had my management system figured out. For the first time it came to a point that time was more limiting to me than money. I went a lot heavier with using custom operators (one guy cuts, rakes, rolls, and wraps 70 acres of alfalfa for me, for half and buys my half at $35 a roll at 50% moisture) This really helps me out since its the furthest field from my center of operations and is pretty mean getting big loads of wet hay out of it.

It sounds like you are working as hard as you can. Now its time to sit down and analyze where you want to go with your business, where you are now, and what is along the line to connect the dots.