Hay hay hay

Dearest reader(s), it is now my desire to share with you some of the trials and tribulations of a summer season on a grassland nature reserve. I am leaving the reserve soon to look for new opportunities, and seeing as we finished the hay-making season there back on 1st September I can reflect on the 2012 hay-making at Roding Valley as I move forward into a new chapter.

We have had a very unpredictable summer this year, with wet weather jumping out unexpectedly on numerous occasions. Hay-making at Roding Valley Meadows LNR is a three day process, and requires good weather (to dry out the hay, and to avoid damaging the ground if it becomes too wet). The first day is when the field is cut using a tractor and mower, leaving suitable margins for wildlife of course. The second day of the process involves turning and fluffing the hay using a tedder so that it can dry out further. The third and final day usually sees the hay turned again before making bales out of it using the tractor with a large red baling machine attached.

The hay-making process removes biomass from the fields, preventing the rank species from dominating and then excluding the wildflowers (and also preventing succession which would lead to the field becoming a woodland!). The length of the process allows the wildflower seeds to drop out from the cut flowers, so the important species that are present can persist into future years.

 

Most of the fields are managed with a cut for hay at Roding Valley Meadows, although conditions and time constraints rarely allow for all of these fields to be cut each year. Fields which had to miss a cut the previous year, and fields which have problems with scrub or rank species, might be prioritised - this is often assessed by looking at which species are growing in the field. The same goes for those with higher level designations (Site of Special Scientific Interest); the first field we tackled was a SSSI field called Lower Mead, which is high up the priorities list due to its designation as well as the important plant species that led to that designation.

2012 saw the reserve sign up to the higher level stewardship scheme (HLS), which entailed stricter constraints on the management of the reserve. Requirements of the scheme, such as only cutting for hay between mid-July and the end of August, benefit wildlife and encourage managers to act in more wildlife-friendly ways in exchange for a fiscal incentive. The later start to the haymaking season allows more of the important wildflowers to be pollinated and to seed before being cut. It also makes for a briefer window in which to attempt the haymaking process on all of the fields! Sometimes we risked the hay in order to get the field cut, as even when the hay is spoiled by rainfall during the three-day process (as happened once or twice) the biomass is removed which can fulfil the conservation aims. The downside is that there isn't a final product to sell, which would help to recoup the costs of the process, but when there is so little time in the season it can be deemed worth it from a conservation perspective to go ahead with the cut from time to time.
Summer 2012 was apparently the wettest Summer in a hundred years according to Met Office data. This meant that, dodging the precipitation events, there were fewer windows of haymaking opportunity. The river Roding also flooded just a few weeks before haymaking could start due to sheer quantities of rainfall, and this meant that the lower fields were still very wet during the season, preventing access and the use of machinery for haymaking on perhaps half of the fields. The warden and I discovered the difficulties encountered when working on unfavourable ground: when we made hay on one of the top fields, we realised it was wetter than expected! Conditions seemed acceptable for making hay, and indeed the hay itself dried rather well, but the ground began to show signs of damage when driving machinery across the field. The land-rover eventually became stuck fast in a patch of wet ground, once the trailer was heavy with loaded haybales. Although we managed to extricate the land-rover using the tractor, this highlighted the impossibility of making hay on the fields lower down the valley where ground conditions were even worse.

Besides the weather and getting stuck in the mud, it was also necessary to contend with machinery breaking down and needing to be repaired. Making hay can be very hard on machinery, being stressful for the implements and not just the workers! Blades and tines on the machinery can get blunt or break when they hit stones, wood, or just plain tough vegetation. Bumps in the field can catch moving parts, although some machines have safety features that then engage - for example there is a shear bolt inside the bailer which, to prevent the important and expensive parts of the machine from breaking, will "shear" apart instead. The downside is that this bolt is right inside the machine behind the clutch and so is still quite tricky to replace!

Using a tractor and machinery makes the haymaking process much easier than it could be. One or two persons can carry out most of the process through use of the machinery, but when it gets to the third and final day it is all hands on deck at Roding Valley Meadows! On the baling day here may be hundreds and hundreds of hay bales to handle, throw onto the trailer by hand, stack properly and strap down. Even with the aid of helpful volunteers (and we had some very helpful volunteers indeed for most of the baling days) it can be a long day, for example running from 7 or 8am through til 9 or 10pm at night on occasion. Volunteers would normally join the reserve staff around the middle of the day however, after any turning of the hay and rowing up with the machinery. Once bales start popping out of the baler it then becomes a more labour-intensive day! Volunteers are free to leave when their other commitments (or their stomachs) require, often staying until dinnertime.

This year, although we did have some hiccups (such as getting stuck in the mud, or the shear bolt breaking), I don't think we ran past 9pm. Better than last year, where on one occasion we were out past 10pm! We were also fortunate to have some volunteers willing to give up part of their evening to stay out later with us on some of those baling days, which can make all the difference to how early or late the whole process finishes.
In the seven weeks of the haymaking season, we managed to get almost all of the upper hay fields cut; these are the fields which aren't flooded by the river, so these are perhaps all that could be expected with the flood meadows so wet from flooding. There was a section of 18 acre field which could have been cut, if the weather had provided another sufficiently-long window without rain before the end of the season. On the bright side, the section we did manage to cut from 18 acres was apparently the first haycut in that field in several years, so that should have a huge benefit for the finer grasses and the wildflowers which will have been struggling to survive in this area besides the coarse grasses and small shrubs.

The end of haymaking isn't the end of the story. The Autumn grazing programme is another chance to reduce biomass on the fields, so the warden will have the opportunity to "cut" the lower fields using the cattle this Autumn. The herd will be another group of cows from the same grazier that was used earlier in the year for the trial Spring graze. That herd was a very mixed bunch, so if the Autumn herd is anything like it then visitors to the reserve will have the chance to see cows of all different colours and patterns and sizes doing their bit for conservation!

Although making hay is quite a physically and mentally demanding process, it can be very satisfying. It has also been great to consider that all of the hard work benefits the grassland, and is carried out by a charity for conservation purposes rather than done for commercial reasons. At the end of a long hard day, with aching muscles and dust in my hair and engine oil in my clothes, at least I could look out in the twilight over the field that we'd managed to cut, or look at the sunset over the Roding river. Aaaaaahhhhh!