Ben was home for the day from college, and he spent the day working on a job he's been pecking away at for the last month. He has been cleaning out the manure stacking area and spreading the material on the grazing strips. The extended spell of dry weather has all but put an end to the grazing season, and Ben has been taking advantage of the dry conditions to get all the strips covered, especially the ones that are usually on the wet side.

We built our stacking area over ten years ago before we started composting. Over the years, material had built up and the area hadn't been totally cleaned out for quite some time. Now that we have 45 acres to crop hay from, we have been using more material out of the stacking area, and with Ben's hard work it's almost empty. Even though we try to compost most of our manure, there are times when we need a place to store manure that is too messy to put into a compost windrow. The stacking area gives us the necessary storage, then we can use this material during the summer to feed the hay-producing meadows between cuttings.

The cows, shut down in the pasture at the end of the lane, watched Ben shuttle back and forth from the stacking area to the pasture, waiting to be let back up the lane at milking time. They're probably hoping to have another round bale waiting in the bale ring in the barnyard. We had to start feeding them stored feed rather than relying on grazing alone because the pastures just were not regrowing without rain. Luckily, the crop year was very good and we'll have lots of dry hay through the winter. Next week we'll probably start feeding two bales a day to compensate for the declining production in the pastures. Grazing season can never start early enough in the spring or end late enough in the fall, but we take what the seasons bring us and make the best of it.