This Bountiful Land: Pasture First Cutting

It was not the purpose for cutting and baling hay that the grands have a place to play King (er Queen) of the Mountain.

But the fact that they invented their own entertainment and burned off some youthful energy in the process (with digital devices nowhere in sight) is one pleasant side-effect of last week’s haying.

The purpose, of course, was to power the growth of meat animals who will digest the tens of thousands of round bales cut in Floyd County and turn it into protein for growing bodies like those of the grand daughters and me and other bipedal omnivores.

Each of these rolls–not the largest that can be baled–weighs 1800 pounds. Our five acres made 8 of them. That works out to about 3000 pounds per acre for our unmanaged field. Multiply this times the number of pasture-acres that have gotten a first mowing in June.  That’s an awfully efficient and productive conversion of sunlight into living matter.  But the hay is just a means towards another end.

It takes about 100 pounds of hay to make a pound of beef, and 150 gallons of water for a hamburger-sized portion.  The costs of a pound of beef are not all captured in the price we pay for it at Slaughters.

Every feeding-chain step between the primary producers (photosynthetic grains and grasses etc) and the ultimate consumer reduces the mouths that can be fed from that feedstock.

Watching this process unfold with the grand daughters–who observed this spectator event with great interest from lawn chairs on the branch bridge on Saturday–made me aware of the need to be a “mindful omnivore.”

There are a lot of reasons to think before we eat.