Why Small Farms Farms fail! We've gotta learn to think about this!

hey there folks I'm Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome to my first generation regenerative Farm here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina these are my cows it's the dead of winter and you don't see a mud hole isn't that amazing come along today and we're going to talk to you guys a little bit about how we run our regenerative Farm here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and why we don't put our hay in a barn it's wasting money it's wasting time it's wasting Fuel and it'll destroy your farm and we don't want that right sweetie we don't want that that's right good girl come along guys let's learn a little bit together [Music] my freedom mountains what you can kiss all right folks welcome to the Stoney Ridge Farm this your first time here your 50 millionth time please hit that like button consider subscribing to the channel again we're on 150 acre first generation Farm here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina the videos I create are sometimes tool reviews sometimes tractor videos sometimes working on the farm just all sorts of stuff sometimes we're even inside cooking so there's all sorts of great rural lifestyle content here and even a little bit of hot rod content but today's video we really want to focus on farming we're going to focus on some of the thought process behind what I do here on the Stoney Ridge Farm the thought process of saving money the thought process of saving fuel Saving Time feeding our cows less input costs no medications for our cows no outside input other than cows land and grass and that's pretty much it so what you see behind me is called a Greg Judy Balin roller and that is a Honda Foreman 500. what you see over here is a new Pioneer 1006 side by side it's a six seater side by side we use both of these pieces of equipment here on the farm to roll out hay to our cattle when you look around the farm here and we'll kind of pan the camera around just a little bit Sun's about to go down so you might get a little bit of Shadow but when you look around you don't see mud you don't see a disaster you don't see a mess and when you drive down the road or you go look at your own Farm or your grandpa's farm you might see something a little bit different you might see mud dirty tractors muddy cows manure everywhere a total disaster in the winter time now farming can be very challenging in the wintertime and here's one of the ways that I get away with not having a muddy Mucky nasty gross Farm I don't worm my cattle okay and you might be rolling your eyes oh you didn't worm his cattle are probably all sick and dying you guys you see the cows I'm going to scroll a little shot of the cows as they're uh standing here waiting for me to roll out the next hay bale you see the cows they don't need to be wormed when they're not grazing and or eating and consuming their food near their own feces okay so we have to think about that what causes disease in animals what causes disease in humans what really causes disease and infection is filth filth causes disease so when you think about it we move our cattle in the summertime two times per day they don't see their own manure for longer than 12 hours in a particular Paddock here on the farm what we're really here to talk about today is storing your hay these are round bales we use round bales here on the Stoney Ridge Farm they're easier to handle for one person it's just me and my significant other my wife or ex-wife or whatever we're going to make that into pretty soon my future wife out here on the farm this is about a thousand pound hay bale and it's on the Greg Judy Balin roller we store all of our hay and you can see a row of hay right here outside these round bales have what we would call a thatched roof on it so if you think about it for a millennia people Built Homes and they used thatch they used hey they use straw they use grass-like material to shelter their homes these hay bales have a thatched roof over top of them and they don't go bad when they're sitting outside now you leave this hay bale outside for five years yeah sure it's going to go bad it's going to rot these hay bales were put here in the spring probably sometime yeah mid-may-ish and they're spring cut hay I alternate the hay that I put on the farm in other words in the certain years I'll use a fall cut hay and in certain years I'll rotate and I'll use a spring cut hey those different types of hay have different types of grass seeds in them and we want to stimulate both cool season grasses and warm season grasses here on the farm so each hay bale contains its own seed bank so inside that hay bale is probably I don't know 10 to 15 pounds of good quality cool season grass seed inside of it we're going to go over there and take a look at it what I'm trying to sell you on here is you don't need to build a fifty thousand dollar Barn to house a fifty dollar bale of hay and to save a minute amount of money and let me explain that to you a little bit closer as we get up next to this Bale so this bale of hay is setting up on the Greg Judy Balin roller I'll post a link down the video description to greenpasturesfarm.net it's my friend Greg Greg buildses he sells these they're an awesome piece of equipment and they're an instrumental part of this regenerative farm this is a hay bale much like the hay bales that you see in the row back here it was sitting on the ground and this is the portion that was sitting on the ground we're going to take a deeper look at that and we're also going to take a deeper look at the top of this hay Bill where it's been rained on it's been rain sleeted snowed all sorts of stuff for about six months now and it's doing absolutely fantastic we're talking about the amount of waste that goes into this hay bale is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of three to five percent so doing the math fifty thousand dollars for a barn you got a tractor you got to put fuel in let's not even factor in the cost of the tractor let's just factor in the fuel cost and the time cost so we build a barn way over on the other side of the farm closer to the house where we don't have to fight our way through the the mud well we've got to keep gravel down for that Barn so we've got to put our gravel input in we're probably going to spend 2500 to 3 000 on gravel so we got 53 000 bucks in a hay shed to house 200 bales of hay and that's how much hay we consume here on the farm on an annual basis 200 bales of hay three percent of a 50 bale of hay is a dollar and fifty cents got me Dollar and fifty cents times 200 is how much that's 300 per year not even considering the time savings and the fuel costs that it takes to take the bales of hay off of the trailer put them in the barn stack them in the barn then when you need the hay you've got to take the hay down set it out of the barn haul it all the way across the farm then you got to get your Bailon roller and set it out here hook to it and unroll it we're talking about moving massive amounts tons and tons of material around your farm on a heavy heavy tractor what have we found over years and years and years of experience on a farm when you take a heavy piece of equipment and you run it over top of soft winter soil and make no mistake this soil is very soft you take heavy equipment you run over the soil and you destroy the soil infrastructure there is infrastructure in the soil there is a living things in your soil that you are destroying as you run over it you're destroying all the fungi the mycorrhizal fungi which fix nitrogen they actually pull nitrogen from the air and pull it to the soil so that you don't have to put in commercial fertilizer input that's what we do here on the farm so again we're doing the math at a dollar and fifty cents per Bale 200 bales we're talking about three hundred dollars worth of hay savings per year 300 which is the equivalent of how many Bales 50 Bale 50 let me do math on camera which is horrible six bales of hay totally six bales of hay wasted but not wasted this portion of the hay bale goes to feeding the land I want to take a closer look at it with you real quick so for the sake of this video this is our sacrifice bail this is a net wrap Bale I totally encourage you if you do buy hay for your farm if you're thinking about buying hay for your farm or you're thinking about building a farm or if this is just something that you find interesting understand the only part of this hay bale that's really going to go bad is the bottom piece right here and it's only about that much we're going to get our razor knife out here and we're going to open this up real quick just part of it I'm not going to feed this hay bale today we just want to open up some of it so you guys can see what's good and what goes bad so this is what's in contact with the ground if you want to avoid contact with the ground you can take logs and lay them out and set your hay on logs all these hay bales that are behind us are specifically set out so that I can back to them with the Bailon roller and do this very easily I have a stack of hay here I have a stack of hay in the other pasture I have a stack of hay and the other pasture every single pasture has a stack of hay or rows of hay so that I don't have to move across my land and destroy the soil's infrastructure okay that's the whole goal and next year my soil will be better and the year after my soil will be better we don't bail hay right off the farm now a lot of you guys might be rolling your head we're going to get in here don't worry a lot of you guys might be rolling your eyes rolling your eye you don't bail hay off your farmer you know well here's the way we decided to do that is instead of maintaining and keeping up sixty thousand dollars worth of infrastructure in order to bail hay we decided that we would buy high quality hay and bring this carbon to our land in other words each one of these hay bales weighs now let's just say for simplistic purposes one thousand pounds that is 100 tons of carbonaceous biomass that we are bringing to our land every year by buying our hay versus bailing our hay so if we bailed our hay we'd have to buy hay string we'd have to buy the fuel we'd have to take the time we'd have to have a rake a Tedder a cutter and a Baler and a tractor to pull it all and sometimes multiple tractors not to mention a trailer to load the hay on and haul the hay to wherever it is we're going to haul it to put it in a barn there's fifty thousand more dollars guys it's dollars and cents and it makes sense to build your soil versus maintaining infrastructure Okay so for simplistic purposes ten thousand dollars worth of hay this year we will waste three hundred dollars worth of that hay and we're right here in the crustiest nastiest part of the bottom of this Bale okay that's it that's the nasty okay so I'm gonna get in here let's just take my knife and get in there right quick I'm gonna get in here and I'm gonna show you how much we're wasting okay we're gonna cut out a little square it's gonna blow your mind it's not much it doesn't make sense to put your hay in a barn just cause grandpa did it doesn't mean you need to do it for your property okay this is unconsumable unusable hay this is biomass and carbon that will feed your land this is the next little bit of it smells like good hay to me smells pretty good the cows will consume it as we dig in here about half an inch to an inch we start digging in and pulling out good hay this is good hay right so why in the world would I put my hay in a fifty thousand dollar shed take a 35 to 50 000 tractor scoop that hay out set it on the ground carry one bale in the front one bale on the back take a 8 500 pound machine move that Hay all around my farm destroying my infrastructure making a huge mud hole only to save three hundred dollars per year how many years would it take to make that back if you paid fifty thousand dollars to build your barn and let's just say for simplistic purposes every month you're going to spend at least six hours taking hay down and putting hay out versus every day that I come out here and roll out a bale of hay it literally takes me 15 minutes I move the cows I grab a bale I unroll the Bale the cows totally consume that Bale whatever is Left Behind is grass seed and it's carbon carbonaceous material that's left on the soil that's food for microbes and earthworms which will soften your soil it will create humus which is the the basic building blocks of soil life humus so guys that's what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about today we're actually going to go on the other side of this bill and you're going to see the part of the Bale that was rained on versus the part that was right here on the ground and we all Now understand that it's not much waste we're going to cut open right into here this is net rapid again this hay has been sitting out in the sun in the rain in the hail in the sleet in the ice and look literally that much that much of it is bad the rest of it is good high quality hay for the cows to eat inside this hay is we shake it we shake it we've got seed we've got Fescue seed we've got cool season grasses we've got Timothy Clover all that stuff so what we do here on the Stoney Ridge Farm and I want to give you guys this tidbit this food for thought why on Earth are you taking a piece of carbon and storing it inside a fifty thousand dollar Barn to only save yourself probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty dollars per year how many years would it take to pay for that Barn how many hay barns have gone up from people putting hay in their barn and it's too wet parking the tractor in there and the tractor and the hay burns up never ever store your Machinery in the same Barn that you store your hay if you guys are already storing your hay I hope this little bit of food for thought is helping you helping you with your decision making process take that barn and make it something usable for your farm and store your hay just like we're storing it right over here this is how we store our hay it's all lined up in a row the ideal scenario is that each individual hay bale does not touch the other individual hay bale because when they do they create a v in there and that V is where water likes to stay and stagnate and rot that hay bale so not only we have a rotten bottom you'll have rotten on both sides so don't let them touch set them up just like this we take the Balin roller we back up we grab one bale of hay these are 33 cows we grab one bale of hay per day and we roll it out if we had 66 cows we'd be rolling out two Bales that's how we do it that's what we do on the Stony Ridge Farm this video was inspired by a viewer leaving a comment arguing with me about how much hay I wasted by not putting it in a barn and I'm telling you I'm not wasting hay and I'm not wasting money every piece of that Bale gets put to use when we're out here grazing the cows graze off one-third they trample one-third and they leave one third when we roll out a bale of hay they eat 85 to 95 percent and the rest of it gets trampled back into the land we target specific areas that need nutrient you'll see a little bit of broom sedge out here a little broom straw we target those areas what comes out of that cow's butt is pH neutral we are not not throwing money on the land we're throwing Carbon on the land and the cows are doing the work thanks so much guys for joining me here on the Stoney Ridge Farm today this is how we store our hay this is what we do to regenerate the land this is what we do to build soil and bring carbon back to our land guys we're destroying our top soils with commercial fertilizers we're destroying it with a quick fix pill we need to start thinking about saving our environment saving our soil getting better earthworms getting better microbes and building our soil so we don't have to go spend money at the co-op every year if I had to fertilize this Farm it cost me 25 000 a year I got ten thousand dollars worth of hay right here and I haven't fertilized in six years thanks guys take care have a wonderful day [Music] here and sweet that's the way waves don't erase good girl and beside me behind me run over sarf softs here we go