We usually start bringing hay out to the animals in late October or when the first hard frost comes and the grass is no longer nutritious. We also have a big new mouth to feed, Chloe the pony and she eats a lot and continuously. We control her time on lush grass, but she has turned the back pasture into smooth carpet, as horses will do.

The grass is also very dry and turning brown, it has been a  hot, dry summer, one of the driest in memory. If the climate continues to change in this direction, it will be expensive and challenging to keep animals. We’ve begun bringing out a third of a bale in the afternoon, once a day, and the animals are gobbling it up, something they don’t do if there is good grass for them to eat. They prefer good grass to hay, but not dried up grass.

In parts of the South and West, where there is drought and heat, hay is costing $10 a bale, that will be a crisis for farm animals and for the people who own them.

We’ll say what happens, maybe it will rain, but I have the feeling our animals will be on hay by the end of the month or the early weeks of October. We might need to have more hay on hand.