Thankful for some extra!

The past few days have found my husband and I hauling bales home from about 5 miles north of our place. Due to the drought conditions in many places, the USDA allowed haying and grazing of CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) land. We don't have any CRP however, my husband's cousin does. He has fewer cattle than we do and cut what hay he needed and asked if we wanted the piece of CRP he wasn't going to hay. Wow! What a shot in thearm! We have quite a bit of carry over from last year but cut less than half of what we did last year. Last spring and summer were very wet and we had plenty of hay to cut. We even sold four semi loads of it that went down to southeastern Wyoming. We have kind of regretted it since it dried up on us this summer.It is nice to have this extra hay on hand now!

For CRP hay, it really wasn't too bad for as dry as it was. It made quite a few bales for us. Plus if we had bought as much hay as we baled it sure would have cost us more than the small amount we had to pay for the CRP payment reduction!

Thank goodness for family, like my husband's cousin, who are so thoughtful and kind to offer what they didn't need! Hopefully, we won't even have to use this hay this winter. I hope it snows, Lord knows we need the moisture! I'm crossing my fingers that it won't be as hard of a winter as two and three years ago. I know we are sleeping better knowing we have plenty of hay now! We feed our cattle pretty darn good thru the winter, sure is nice to know we will be able to do that again this winter!