As an experiment, I brought one of the large round bales of fermented hay to the sheep in the barnyard this morning.  My motivation was partly self-serving, since putting out 1000lbs of baleage would let me skip bringing small square hay bales to the sheep several times a day, but I also thought (rationalized) that it might benefit the sheep as well.  The baleage is both more palatable and more nutritious than dry hay, so I hoped that it might help fatten some of the very thin lactating ewes, getting them to eat a larger quantity of higher-quality food.  I also hoped that it would encourage the lambs to eat more grass and nurse less, both speeding their transition to fully-functioning ruminants and easing the caloric burden on their mothers.  My biggest concern was that baleage is perishable, and I wasn’t sure if the 8 sheep and 8 lambs would consume it before it started to turn into mush and mold.  The sheep and lambs were very enthusiastic about their new grub, but we’ll see how fast they eat it.

One of my other projects today was taking the accumulated farm trash and recycling to the Keene city dump.  I was a little taken aback to see that the majority of the load was made up of the plastic bale wrappers that preserve the fermented hay.

In some parts of the country with a higher density of working farms, there are recycling programs for plastic bale wrappings, but here it all goes into the trash stream.  I’d like to believe that I can come up with a way to recycle all this shit at some point, but for now I just leave my conscience at the gate and chuck the plastic into the big dumpster at the transfer station.