# Ditch Hay



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

From Progressive Forage Grower...

Regards, Mike

http://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/alfalfa/getting-a-handle-on-ditch-hay-quality


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

About every road ditch is baled here.A lot are cut late because the ditch is to wet earlier when the hay should of been cut for quality.I used to bale the Interstate ditch and did a quite a bit as custom work.I quit baleing the Interstate when rent on it became a bidding war another guy wanted it worse then I did.I wonder why he filed bankruptcy?Quit doing custom baleing in other road ditches when it cost me more in repairs and time then I was chargeing.

Some ditches are not bad baleing if they are flat and wide a lot here are deep and steep because the roads are built higher because of snow and water drainage.

The article doesn't say anything about junk in the ditch,it probably wasn't bad there in ND being a less populated area but here there is plenty of garbage in the ditch that gets baled up.Aluminum pop cans get shredded by disc mowers,neighbor lost 2 cows from them.Plenty of other junk to cause hardware.Plenty of plastic pop and water bottles also that end up in the manure and then out in your fields when spreading manure.

On the other hand if it looks ok baled up it sells and a decent price compared to hay that is off a field and not full of garbage.


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## IHCman (Aug 27, 2011)

My sister is a county agent here so my ditch hay got sampled for that study. Most of our township roads aren't to bad for trash. Find the occasional beer can or bottle. I did bale some ditches along Hwy 2 once and said never again after that. Unbelieveable the amount of trash in those highway ditches. Somehow baled up a four foot long aluminum step off a semi truck that must have fallen off. First time dad run the bale processor he got that bale with the step in. Didn't hurt nothing on the processor but scared the hell out of him with the noise it made as it went through.

I hay ditches because I like how they look all cleaned out and I figure if I'm cutting em I might as well rake and bale them. So ditches are usually one of the last things I bale for the year. Not to concerned with the quality of ditch hay as it isn't my primary feed source, tend to feed a couple bales of it per day when its cold out, let the cows eat what they want.

The stuff of mine that was sampled was cut around the end of August. Surprisingly it tested better than what NDSU says the states prairie hay averages.

My question was doesn't NDSU have more important issues to study than frickin ditch hay? lol Leafy Spurge is a much bigger problem in ND.


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## slowzuki (Mar 8, 2011)

They must have made a mistake on the units for ash, the article says a sample was 37% ash... That's getting close to what a sample of sod would be isn't it?


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

That was a bad sample for sure....but it did state that the average sample was around 7% ash.

Regards, Mike


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## slowzuki (Mar 8, 2011)

7% is pretty normal I think. Maybe next to very dusty road for the high ash. I see some of the hay laid a long time before baling.


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## stack em up (Mar 7, 2013)

I absolutely abhor mowing road ditches. When you figure how much per bale you actually make, a good hayfield will blow the pants off of it.

That being said, I mow a lot of road ditches. Least favorite chore of the year.

On the bright side, I did find a toilet in one of our ditches last year....


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

Arent here the department of transportation does the mowing. Instead of letting a farmer mow it we have government employess using government equipment. No wonder our taxes are soo high..


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

When I baled interstate ditches there was all sorts of red tape.Besides the bidding process there was 5 pages of rules to follow.Liability insurance required 500K.Any employees had to be covered by workmanship comp also.Could not be in the ditch for any reason before sunup or after sundown.Couldnt cut until after Aug 1 which made some over mature hay.plus about 50 other Rules.


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## 8350HiTech (Jul 26, 2013)

PaMike said:


> Arent here the department of transportation does the mowing. Instead of letting a farmer mow it we have government employess using government equipment. No wonder our taxes are soo high..


Would you want to mow and bale along I-78?


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## VA Haymaker (Jul 1, 2014)

Honestly - I'm surprised it's allowed at all. With big brother managing just about every aspect of our lives - I could hear the arguments against it. Hay tainted with carbon fumes, tractors trampling grazing areas, compacting soil runoff, environmental disaster from machinery oil drips and the grass wicking the bottom of the tractor. Cab required to limit noise to the operator, deflect flying rocks kicked up by passing cars and air bags in case of a collision. No plastic twine or net wrap incase some is dropped. Every kind of insurance required, fees and paperwork out the arse. Just fill in the blank.

Sorry, it's early and I'm a bit grumpy this morning.....


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

They quit allowing hay baleing on the interstates in Mn 5+ yrs ago.They claimed wildlife habitat.


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## Farmerbrown2 (Sep 25, 2018)

Wife's uncle mowed along I78 said it was like playing Russian rulet actually had a state cop tell him to mow somewhere else cop didn't want accident on his shift he didn't have time for the paperwork that day.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

8350HiTech said:


> Would you want to mow and bale along I-78?


Changed a trailer tire along 78 one time. It was an adventure...

I had just enough room to be "off" the road...


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## JD3430 (Jan 1, 2012)

I would think you could potentially be sued for "creating a distraction" causing someone to get distracted and in an accident.


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## glasswrongsize (Sep 15, 2015)

I've seen road ditches baled before (in other states between here and SD, ND, and MN) and thought it was a fine idea. To me, it seemed like a win/win between the State and the harvester. There was value obtained by the hay person, and the State got their ditches mowed.

Here, nicely paid State workers get paid to mow the ditches. The cost of the manpower, equipment, etc would be negated if it was allowed to be baled. Instead, the State workers are working in the ditch instead of on the road. Prolly a smoother ride in the ditch anyway. It really chafes my shorts to see the township mowing the ditches (really the "ditches" are crap and there are 4 of them...one on each side and two IN the road) when the road has holes that will swallow a small tedder tire. I can see mowing the intersections so that one can see upon approach as there are few stop signs in the county, but mowing miles and miles of road and then claiming that there is not enough money in the budget for fuel for the maintainer (road grader). I don't see too much difference in liability of having a State worker mow it as opposed to an insured baler...other than the baler makes HIS living working with that sort of equipment while the State worker make HIS living working around traffic, and harvesting would equate to more hours of a distraction than mere mowing.

I wonder if they spent all that money to test the quality of the ditch hay in the hopes that they could use the results to demand more compensation/demand for the privilege to bale the ditches? There must be an angle and potential benefit for the State.

73, Mark


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## JD3430 (Jan 1, 2012)

I think I remember a story a few years back where a guy cutting ditches (could have been a farmer, could have been a county worker-I cant remember) lost a mower blade through the side of a guys car, severed his spine and killed him.

I think the liability, especially in today's world, is keeping the ditch hay baling to a minimum. I'm sure there's a way it can be done and I'm pretty sure a bush hog can lose a blade just like a discbine, but like Mark's reasons above-well stated.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

I used to bale ditch hay... ran 5 miles from here to the river on both sides of the road and 5 miles the other way to the edge of town. Back then it was good hay... I could take prime ryegrass that was between knee and waist high and thick as hair on a dog's back... BUT...

Then somehow the folks of this state elected that lush sot Anne Richards. Her idea to "save money" was to quit mowing the roadsides several times a year, and cut it back to only once (maybe twice, but for the last 10 years or so it's only been once per year). Where before, the Mexican's running shredders for the county/state, usually pulling a 15 foot batwing with a 7700 (or equivalent) in low gear (slow walking pace) running it on the ground with the throttle wide open, the mowers would pick up almost ALL the trash and simply PULVERIZE it... and the grass clippings that came out the back were almost a paste it was shredded so fine... so of course that settled down to the ground's surface very quickly and with frequent rains around here, would RAPIDLY rot down with all the paper and garbage, and take the un-rottable detritus from tin cans and plastic right down to the ground surface like mulch where the grass would grow up through it, and you could get a clean cut of hay without picking that crap up. Also smashed up MOST of the bottles and scattered the glass on the ground where it could do no harm.

Once they quit shredding the roadsides 3-4 times a year, all that stuff started building up. I'd be cutting and I could hear the "shotgun blast" of shattering bottles hitting under the drum mower's steel cover... pop cans would usually ride through, unless they were down in the blade path... then they'd get cut up pretty good. One time I heard some gosh-awful buzzing noise from the mower, looked back, and saw I'd neatly bisected one of those huge, heavy, spoked hubcaps off a Cadillac or something-- it was laying just right that the mower cut it clean in two... (well, not really "clean" as the edge was rather like confetti... LOL I always raked the hay down away from the road to the ditch bottom, then rolled it back up about 6 feet off the road, rolling it twice, to allow all the glass and most of the metal or heavier crap to fall out. (Nice thing about a rolabar rake). We fed that hay for many years and never had any problems, other than the "clean up" factor... Heck I started cutting road hay at 14 with a Ford 8N Jubilee and a 501 sickle mower... those WERE a pain in the butt because occasionally you'd hit a paper cup just right and it'd hang up on the guard, the sickle would snip the back half but the bottom would catch on the sickle guard and it'd start leaving an uncut stripe as it knocked the grass down ahead of the sickle... then you had to back up or stop and get off and pull it off... but bottles just flipped over the sickle and cans and plastic generally did the same, though some got snipped...

Once they quit shredding the roadsides, all that trash started just "banking up" and when you'd go to cut hay, you had a h3ll of a mess to deal with. Food bags and Happy Meal boxes and crap like that which would have ROTTED if pulverized and mixed with grass clippings, now sat more or less intact for the better part of a year before FINALLY breaking down... plastic and cans and bottles built up too. Then they passed a law that you can't burn or throw away oil filters or old tires, so guess where that stuff went-- folks don't want to PAY for disposal of it, so the simply toss them out their vehicle into the road ditch after dark when nobody can see them!

Last time I mowed road hay was in the SEVERE drought of 96. I hadn't bothered for a few years before that because of the trash and crud... I had to FIGHT the gubmint for it then... I was cutting and had a state guy come out in a pickup and flag me down, and told me "I wasn't allowed to cut hay". I explained I'd cut the roadsides for the last 20 years (at that time) and never had a problem. He told me they got a new boss, some "Hitler's widow" type witch (which all the state workers HATED her guts!) and she just was determined to screw everybody as much as possible-- she sent him and crew to load a bunch of small square bales out of a guy's barn who'd baled some road hay on the other side of the county the week before. "You have to get her permission, and she won't give it..." I scratched my head a minute, and then said, "Who's HER boss??" The guy got a big sh!t-eating grin on his face, pulled out a card, and wrote down all the details for me while telling me about the guy, what a great guy he was and how much they liked him (while reiterating how much they all HATED "Hitler's Widow") and told me just how to get ahold of him. I called the guy, explained that over 40,000 head of cattle had been reported to have died due to drought and starvation in South Texas over the past few months, and told him I wanted to bale road hay for MY OWN USE... (not to sell)... I had been doing it since I was 14 years old and never had a problem, and was very careful to allow the wildflowers to go to seed before cutting and yield to traffic and other stuff to ensure safety. He was still rather reticent, so I mentioned in passing that it might look AWFUL bad on TV if commentators like Marvin Zindler picked up the story that farmer's were being denied to take road hay to feed starving cattle in the middle of an extreme drought... He thought about that a moment and said, "Well, my concern is safety... so long as you accept ALL liability, and only operate in daylight... are you making square (small) bales or round?? "Rounds", I said... "Don't leave ANY bales on the roadside overnight-- if someone should run off the road and smash into one, it'd be big trouble..." I explained "well, sir, I don't even drop the bales on the roadside... when the baler is full, I just shut it off, wait til traffic is clear, and then pull onto the road and run full speed back to the storage yard and dump them, then run back full speed to where I left off and start baling again. I DID drop them on the roadside ONE time YEARS and YEARS ago, and found out the hard way the difficulties of trying to pick up round bales with a fork on a tractor ON AN INCLINE, on a NARROW roadside, while watching and waiting on traffic to clear, and load them onto a trailer parked ON AN INCLINE, and having to have a second person to run the truck and trailer as well... Basically it SAVES time to just drive back to the house with every bale rather than have to make a second trip later to pick the bales up and load them on a trailer and haul them back and have to run the tractor home anyway to UNLOAD the trailer between trips, and I can do it all myself hauling them back as they're made-- NO truck/trailer driver required! It really only gets inconvenient for those few bales that end up being at the far end of the cut, near the river or at the edge of town... the rest aren't so bad... "

He was satisfied with that and gave me his blessing, and that was the last I ever heard of it...

Problem was, that was my last cut of road hay... I needed it and it got me through some BAD, BAD drought, but geesh... I was cutting and about every quarter to half mile I'd hear the drum mower to "FOOM!" and I'd look back in time to see the rear curtain still straight up in the air and falling back down, and see a CAR OIL FILTER shooting out the back, spinning and rolling like it had been shot out of a cannon, flying back 50 feet or more behind the mower... After a time or two of that, I'd just stop when a car was coming towards me, because one of them went bouncing and pinwheeling up onto the road and I didn't want to risk hitting one right as a car was blowing past me at 65 mph... OR, I'd periodically hear a "WHUMP!" from under the mower and look back and see an old tire in the windrow... The constant "TSSSS!" of glass hitting the underside of the steel top shield of the drum mower, like a handful of coarse sand or pea gravel thrown against a sheet of tin as hard as you could throw it, interspersed with the louder buzz of beer cans and stuff, was just icing on the cake. I looked down at one point to see a TOILET tossed over a guardrail into the ditch, that I had to go around...

Double-raking got rid of all the glass, no problems there... and the cows were mighty glad to get that hay, that's for sure... BUT, I could tell where EVERY BALE was unrolled by the layer of trash, flattened beer and pop cans, and other such detritus was after the cows had picked up every last edible straw of hay around it... After the first trailer-load, I started unrolling them all on low ground down in the bottom of a valley that when it floods, carries all the water the ponds can't hold down into a ravine under the fence... The good news-- I DID pick up several large trash bags of already-flattened pop/beer cans and sold them for the aluminum... LOL

The legacy of Anne Richards stupidity has NEVER been corrected, either. Since they quit mowing the roadsides but MAYBE ONCE per year (if that), the good grasses and wildflowers (in early spring) that dominated the roadsides have been supplanted by PURE WEEDS like ragweed, broomweed, milkweed, and pigweed/amaranth. Plus, huisache and McCartney rose is springing up EVERYWHERE in the roadside ditches-- I've seen huisache bushes over 3-4 feet tall in only a couple years... they shred them off, but they come back from the roots... in a few years, the gubmint is going to have to do a MAJOR chemical brush-killer campaign to retake the roadsides from that thorny crap before it gets unmanageable-- and that will cost a LOT more than shredding 3-4 times a year and keeping a good grass sod that outcompeted it and kept it from getting a foothold in the first place... I SURE don't want any of that thorny crap on the place... and where it's not huisache or McCartney Rose, it's dewberry brambles... just ridiculous! The county HAS been spraying some areas with some sort of salt water/Roundup mix or something that kills EVERYTHING, but it's just a top-kill, and the brambles and briars and brush comes back that much stronger from the roots, because all the competing grass and annual weeds are knocked out by it... What a mess!

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

JD3430 said:


> I think I remember a story a few years back where a guy cutting ditches (could have been a farmer, could have been a county worker-I cant remember) lost a mower blade through the side of a guys car, severed his spine and killed him.
> 
> I think the liability, especially in today's world, is keeping the ditch hay baling to a minimum. I'm sure there's a way it can be done and I'm pretty sure a bush hog can lose a blade just like a discbine, but like Mark's reasons above-well stated.


I know there was a woman killed by a batwing mower blade thrown from a shredder years ago in Mississippi, IIRC... I was on my way out to my girlfriend in North Carolina at the time and they had the road shut down for awhile cleaning up that mess... came right through the windshield and..... well, you get the picture...

Sure gotta be on top of your game on maintenance, that's for sure... remember reading about it, but never heard if it was a blade bolt/pin that came loose and dropped out or so worn down that it finally snapped off and threw the shredder blade...

Later! OL J R


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## JD3430 (Jan 1, 2012)

There's a great major artery in my area that has a really nice 100' wide strip of grass between north & south lanes, that in a perfect world, could be baled. However, because of the heavy amounts of trash thrown in it, it would be irresponsible to feed it. 
The state hires a private contractor to do it. I see the guy and I often wonder if i should get into the bidding. 
When I see him in the cab, he looks very stressed out. Looks like he's scared he's gonna kill somebody, isn't making enough money, or both.


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## stack em up (Mar 7, 2013)

I have a friend along highway 169 heading to the cities who used to mow a lot of 169 median for hay. That is until he started having cows die under weird circumstances. Vet posted a couple animals and found their reticulum had basically been sliced open. Too much glass from busted bottles.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Yeah, you DO have to be careful with it... we baled and fed ditch hay for years... Course in the old days, the state shredded the highways with batwings running in the dirt basically and wide open in low gear, so they basically pulverized everything, bottles included... the clippings coming out the back were practically a paste, so you didn't have to worry about picking up junk later baling hay...

Even still, I always double raked it to roll any glass or heavier junk out... I'd rake it to the bottom of the ditch with the rolabar rake, which gives a good rolling motion to the hay, and then rake it back up about six feet from the edge of the pavement for baling. This eliminated all the glass and heavier metal (crushed aluminum cans and styrofoam cups and stuff are about the same "specific gravity" as the hay (surface area to mass) and don't separate well).

When the state quit mowing the roads but maybe once a year, the ditches have become too overgrown with briars and huisache and of course the bottles and cans and garbage build up and never break down, so baling nowdays just brings too much garbage onto the farm...

Later! OL J R


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