If I owned 500 acres...

I'd rent it to someone for $200/acre and just do hay at Muddy Valley...
I think we have been chopping silage forever but it has really just been two weeks. Or three...
I started at 11 a.m. for reasons to boring to explain and finished at 8:00 p.m. We chopped 31 loads which probably averaged ten tons.
I do not understand dairy people.
I had a whole discussion Sunday about this subject with a hay buyer. He is from Canada and was telling me woes of selling hay to dairies. They try to beat you down on the price and then when you do come down they don't pay you anyway so what was the point.
I try to avoid selling any top quality hay to dairies for the exact same reasons. I only try to market hay to a dairy as a last resort, and then ONLY to people I know.
Silage chopping is the exact same thing.
I do the chopping for a small neighboring dairy.
He is a pretty good guy but he often reverts to Dairyman form.
Today was a good example.
I have a neighbor helping to haul. He is doing it more as a personal favor than as a way to get rich.
I run the silage chopper because it is a decent way to make extra cash in the spring, but also to help my neighbors.
We are not trying to get rich. Mostly we just want to get the field done so we can go home and eat supper before 9 p.m.
The plan is to weigh random loads. Perhaps every four or five loads. It is not so much to keep track of every scrap of silage as to establish a way to be compensated.
We should probably just charge $85 an hour for the truck and $150 for the chopper and another $85 for the mower. The key is that you have to average those numbers to come out. When you work by the ton you have the potential to make more money but then you don't get paid for down time so by the time your are done you hope for these figures as an average.
The dairy fellow decided the silage was drying out so he had the truck drivers weigh. Sure enough they were lighter loads.
This is fine, it averages out.
But then one of the drivers weighed again and he picked a load I accidentally loaded light. I don't intend to load trucks light. I try to cram as much on a truck as will dump.
Because I want to go home and eat supper by 9 p.m.
So then he wanted the other truck to go weigh.
It was 7:45 p.m. I did not want to wait 15 minutes for the truck to come back. I told the truck driver to tell the dairy fairy that the scale was closed. There were only two loads left.
I think he just made up something.
The last load I thought I had crammed the maximum amount on the truck but then I realized I had actually forgotten to top off the back of the truck so perhaps the dairy fairy has a point.
Whatever....
I got my supper by 9:30 p.m.
There has got to be a better way to make a living...