FARMINGTON – This year’s hay harvest came up short.
Cold, wet weather played havoc with the hay during the spring, and then the lack of rain during the summer caused more problems for some farmers.
“It started out pretty bad,” Gary Raymond, executive director of the Franklin County Farm Service Agency, said Wednesday, but some good growing weather followed, despite a lack of rain during the summer. The hay crop harvest is below average in Franklin County, Raymond said, and the quality is OK to good.
Marcia Donald of New Sharon said Wednesday that their hay crop wasn’t as big as in the past.
Her husband, John Donald said this spring when he had started haying that he had fewer bales and didn’t start mowing until five days later than the previous year.
He had expected it to be a good year but it was going to be late in coming.
“We didn’t have anywhere near as much as we hoped because of lack of rain,” Marcia Donald said.
“It was a year of extremes – it was real wet, then real dry and then real wet again, her husband said Wednesday.
“The first crop was good. The second crop was lousy as hell, and the third crop was pretty good and, some fields, I got a fourth crop,” John Donald said.
For the first crop, the quantity was good but the quality wasn’t, he said.
In northern Androscoggin County, Livermore Falls farmer Harold Souther said that although the first cutting wasn’t as large as normal, the second crop made up for it.
“I had a wonderful hay crop,” Souther said Wednesday.
Even though he started haying later, he harvested more than 11,300 bales and has it either all sold or spoken for, he said.
“It was a very good yield and good quality,” he said.
Gayle Smedberg of Oxford said Wednesday this year’s hay crop was OK, but it was down about 25 percent.
She started haying late because the cold weather hadn’t allowed the grass to grow, then it was too wet to hay, Smedberg said.
“The first crop didn’t turn out too bad,” she said, “but we really didn’t get a second crop. We filled all our commitments and we have enough to feed our animals but we won’t have enough to fill all of our customers’ orders.”
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