Farms that Save money and build soil a new way of thinking starts here!

hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to another beautiful sunny day here on the stoney ridge farm we're out here just rolled out some hay to the cows and today we're going to talk to you a little bit about the dollars and cents of why we are not bailing hay and taking from our land and feeding our cows while we're buying hay and bringing it to the farm and whether it makes sense for you on a small scale or even a large scale farm to build your land up by bringing carbon to your farm so come along today we're going to kind of go through the dollars and cents of all this we're going to go through the common sense of all this and we'll talk a little bit about what we're doing to build our soil here on our regenerative farm here in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains of north carolina all right guys the ever pressing question do i buy my hay or do i bail my own hay do i buy a hay cutter do i buy a tedder do i buy a rake do i buy a baler do i buy a round baler do i buy a square baler what do i want to feed my animals do i plant grass seed year after year like orchard grass do i plant native grasses so that native grasses are what grows up and it makes a beautiful bale of hay for next year do i spread fertilizer do i spread lime all of these things are pressing thoughts that went through my head when we first bought our property here in north carolina now we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 acres of cleared pasture land meaning cleared land that will be fenced in for pasture and could be cut for hay what you don't hear a lot about is the old-time farmers talking about this vicious cycle of spreading expensive fertilizer and expensive lime out on the land because you simply cannot take from the land without putting something back around here in north carolina we're in the piedmont region of north carolina we don't have a lot of topsoil you go out to missouri or someplace like that and you've got six foot deep topsoil awesome you've got great top soil you're not having to spread lime every year you're not having to spread fertilizer every year but odds are if you're buying a piece of property and if you're raising cattle on it or if you're raising sheep or if you're raising any sort of ruminant animal that land has been farmed before and it's most likely been completely farmed to death in other words when you send off your soil sample it's going to say you need everything so what do you do you call up your local co-op you get some triple 17 you put it down you put a high nitrogen fertilizer down you kill all of the microbiology in your soil and you end up with a great crop for about three months and then you're back to crap again this is the vicious cycle that i was entering into here on our farm now we've been slowly but surely clearing land and i'll show you right over here to the side and the drone footage that you'll also see all of this was forest it was overgrown old fields these were crop fields this was tobacco land back in the day and tobacco land i guess is notoriously known for tillage and wash away topsoil tillage and wash away topsoil so when i sent off soil samples on our farm we had .03 percent biologic material in our soil that's no biologic material it's basically sand silt and clay that's all we had here on the farm now we've got our ruminant animals first we started with goats the goats helped restore the land we did not buy our hay when we first built the farm when we first started running ruminant animals on the farm we didn't buy our own hay we bailed our own hay and this is how much money we had in hay equipment so we had 6 500 in a used john deere baler which always had a flat tire we constantly i was having to do maintenance on flat tires broken chains belts the baler caught fire there's 6 500 in that there's 2 000 in a hay cutter i cut hay with it the first year did great perfect awesome 160 bales perfect completely awesome now i can buy a bale of hay this bale of hay cost me 25 bucks i bailed 160 bales so if we did 200 bales that's 5 000 okay did it pay for itself almost but count in the baler now count the flat tire that happened on the stinking um hay cutter okay well count the maintenance on the hay cutter second year we went out to cut hay with the hay cutter 160 bales of first year second year turned on the pto boom the transmission completely blew out of the old hay cutter it was an old new holland hay cutter what do i do so i called around tried to get new transmissions for it called the parts places called the junkyards nothing out there under a thousand bucks the hay cutter was a pile of rubble it was junk after that luckily my stepfather had another hay cutter he let me borrow it so here i am on borrowed time i also had a v-rake a rake to rake the hay up into windrows i never bought a tedder a tedder would spread the hay out so it dries quicker then i would rake it into windrows and bale it up the the rake was constantly breaking tines there was constant trouble i'm pulling this with the tractor i'm bouncing all over i'm burning diesel fuel i'm wearing out my machines when i can go and buy this for 25 dollars a bail guys so depending on the area that you live whether you need to put nutrient back in the soil you simply can't take from the land without putting something back year after year you cannot basically rape the land of its nutrients and not put something back or you just will get sorry hey you will get bad hey that's what you're gonna get now the hay we have here is a mixed grass it's a mixed fescue and warm season wild grasses now is this the best quality hay i wouldn't say so i wouldn't say it's the best quality hay out there i'll say that a good quality fescue hay is probably going to run you for a four by five bale around here about 30 to 35 bucks i'm paying 25 dollars a bale for this hay and it's feeding my cows just fine now what we're doing out on the land i'm going to get you some drone footage right now is we're taking our atv and the greg judy bailon roller and we're unrolling hay out onto our land so in spots that need biologic material carbonaceous material this material right here this carbon and this gigantic seed bank is rolling out on the land and feeding the land year after year time after time i don't have a fertilizer bill this year i only spent about twenty five hundred dollars on hay period and that was more than i needed to spend if i had to fertilize all the open land that we have here on the farm it would have cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of seven thousand dollars it would have cost me three thousand dollars to put lime out on this land it would have cost me all the upkeep and all the maintenance of all the hay equipment that we have and it's just not worth it the dollars and cents are not there guys so i encourage you to look at the model that we're using on this farm and think about putting carbon back on your land you can see out here in this pasture let's go over here and show you we're getting ready to unload this this load of hey i've got seven more loads i'm gonna go get do i need seven more loads this year probably not but i'm putting it out on the land anyway because it's a seed bank because it's carbon and that's what i want to do is build carbon on the land look speckled out through that pasture right there and all i see are dollar bills every little black turd pile is a dollar bill stacking up out there on that pasture land that's what we want we're getting rid of clay and we're building topsoil and what you're going to see are results over the next few years of this farm completely turning around okay this is going to go from one of the ugliest farms in the county to one of the most beautiful greenest luscious growing farms in the entire county for the simple fact that we're not taking away from our land and then slinging fertilizer back on it chemical fertilizers we're slinging manure back on it dollar bill dollar bill dollar bill dollar bill dollar bill everywhere scattered completely over this farm we're using wood chips we're using sawdust from the sawmill we're using hay we are using all sorts of carbon along with that manure along with that animal urine and we're moving our cattle we're mob stocking and moving our cattle i hope you guys have learned a little bit we're going to go ahead and we're going to use the tym 254 tractor it's a tiny little tractor it's a 25 horsepower tractor we'll take you over and let you see it real quick before we get started but we're going to go ahead and we're going to unload this hay there are a few things that you need to know if you're getting a bail on roller similar to what we have you have to set your hay up in a way that you can back up to it easily you don't want to put your hay in a low spot and drag it up the hill you want to put your hay in a hot spot and drag it down the hill so these are a lot of just very very simple practices that you need to put into place on your property in order to save the time to save the money and to build the soil now where we're standing right now will be fenced somewhere in the next three to five years this this area right here we're getting ready to build a pond we do not allow our livestock into any water sources we don't allow them in the creeks we don't allow them in the ponds we don't allow them in the rivers we don't allow our livestock in the watershed and another reason why you can see this land is a little bit beat down right here it's not really muddy you don't see a mud hole on this farm and if you drive down any country road and you look at a farm in it's early february right now you look in a farm late january early february and you're going to see a huge yucky muddy mess with cows wading waist deep in mud and muck you don't see it here because we're unrolling our bales that's what makes the difference the cows are consuming 90 to 95 percent of the hay the rest of it is getting trampled down into the land it's getting manure spread on it and the seed bank when you unroll this bale it's flying everywhere the seed the grass seed is spreading out on the land so we're not buying seed so another thing that we're cutting down on this year we'll have to overseed our pastures at least one time in the fall but i'm not so sure that we'll even have to do that guys we have these giant seed banks right here and instead of paying 60 a bag for fescue grass seed or god knows how much for native grass seed i mean it's absolutely ridiculously expensive we're taking this hay full of the seed and rolling it out on the land and letting the cows step it into the land i think it's a smart thing to do i think it's a good way of thinking and i think maintaining more equipment and infrastructure on your farm sometimes makes sense other times it does not make sense does it make sense for you to keep 30 or 40 thousand dollars worth of hay making equipment so that you can lose money with it every year year after year after year it doesn't make any sense i don't know how this guy can sell me hey for 25 dollars a bail i just don't know how he can do it now we're going to bring the little tym tractor over here and we'll show you these hay bales are reaching the upper limit of the lifting capacity on this tractor however this little tractor has a light footprint and this land is wet soaking wet but that little tractor won't tear the land up and that's something that's important if i was on my john deere 50 65 something that was 50 60 70 horsepower i would be leaving huge ruts out here in this pasture it's all about a low footprint and putting carbon back on your land so let's check out the little tractor before we unload all right so here's the little guy this is the little guy the little tym 254 tractor a lot of folks have been asking about this tractor i'm going to do a comprehensive walk around and review but i'm going to give you just a few tidbits right now this is a 24.8 or 25 horsepower yanmar powered little tym tractor these tractors are made in south korea i challenge you right now to find me a tractor that's made 100 percent in the usa from the headlights to the exhaust to the to the valve train to everything is made in the usa i challenge you your personal challenge right now a lot of folks have given me flack about looking at these little korean tractors but there's nothing wrong with that and again i challenge you there is not an american made 100 percent american-made tractor there isn't we looked i looked and when it comes to dollars and cents it made sense for me to look at the tym lineup so the tym 254 tractor the lift capacity on the loader is somewhere between 600 650 pounds don't quote me on that i'm not a factory tractor guy i'm just out here working with it we decided to get the tractor with the backhoe attachment with the small backhoe attachment we're going to be doing a lot of trenching across the farm here because we're going to be running water systems next year so i hope you guys will subscribe the channel and check out all the building that we're going to be doing we're going to put in frost free waters throughout the farm here we've got a bunch of land that we've just newly fenced but we don't have a water source so i can't move the cows over there just yet because it's still winter time i have no way of keeping water from being frozen over that on the other side of the farm so we're going to take this little 24.8 or 25 horsepower tractor and we're going to unload these gigantic round bales this thing is a hoss of a little machine i hope you guys enjoy the drone footage of the cattle out here doing their thing eating you'll kind of get to see all of the hay bales that we've rolled out and i've rolled out somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 hay bales out here and i'm to roll out another 30 bales before we move these cows that's going to put a ton of carbon on the land and you're going to see in the spring this is going to absolutely explode with growth because it's covered with manure it's going to be super cool guys so i hope you enjoy some of this footage here at the end we're going to unload this hey we got to go pick up seven more loads and we're going to station those loads in different high points here all over the farm so that we can feed our cows and feed our land with the hay that we bought instead of buying fertilizer maintaining equipment buying lime doing all that work burning all that diesel we're just spreading carbon on the land and feeding the land [Music] do that little tractor is not supposed do you hear my mad cow i've got an angry cow that just wants to scream over and over and over i just unrolled two bales out here and they're all bunched up around where a little piece of bale fell apart cows are so strange so if one decides to get water 25 are gonna go get water if one decides there's some hay over here 25 of them are gonna go to that spot it's hilarious guys that little tractor is not supposed to be able to do this that little tractor is a workhorse i've used this thing every single day since it's been here the tym 1104 is a big tractor puts a big footprint it's too wet to get out here on the land with it but this thing is awesome you can't even tell hardly where it's been and this is wet wet ground thanks a lot guys we'll see you next [Music]