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GORDON DANIELS

In a field off Old Goshen Road in Williamsburg, David McCulloch drives a tractor pulling an automatic baler, while helpers Dave Waldo, left, and Caleb Carriere, both of Williamsburg, work to stack a mounting harvest of hay. A wet June put McCulloch and others seriously behind in their haying.

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GORDON DANIELS

Mike Fournier picks up round bale hay in a field off East Street in Easthampton on Monday. He was helping Adam Burt, left, who was running the baling machine. Burt uses some of the hay for his beef cows and sells the rest.

A meteorological twist of fate saved David McCulloch's weekend, allowing him to do something he meant to do all June - cut a field of hay.

Though rain Friday night soaked Williamsburg center, the storm spared fields off Old Goshen Road in Williamsburg. "Half a mile up the road, they didn't get a drop. That's why I put it down on Saturday," he said. "We were very fortunate and when the weather broke, I took a chance."

Enough grass went down - and enough sunshine bore down on the hillside - to make 300 bales of hay on Sunday, as McCulloch and farmers across the Valley raced to catch up on delayed haymaking.

But as they waited through June, their work postponed by rain, the nutritional quality of the grass that would eventually be baled as hay slowly declined.

Through June, Valley farmers who cut hay for animal feed watched their tractors rust, as above-average rainfall kept them out of the fields during prime haying time. Having missed an early start on haying, Valley farmers will be playing catch-up all summer to make up for the lower quality and quantity of bales.

"The tractors are just parked in the yard," said Robert Fletcher, of Fletcher Farm in Southampton. "In May, the hay looked beautiful, but now it's all gone by."

Mowing and baling hay at the right time is important for farmers like Fletcher. Once mowed, hay needs two or three sunny days to dry before it can be baled and stored. If the hay is baled wet, it can mold and create toxins that will sicken livestock.

While waiting for sunny days in June, Fletcher's hay fields went to seed and, as of last week, were past their prime harvesting stage.

According to the National Weather Service station in Pittsfield, June has been unusually rainy in most of western Massachusetts. Rainfall for the month was 6.61 inches, almost 3 inches more than average. Besides the first week of the month, there was not a single span of three dry days in a row.

Fletcher was able to bale about 1,000 bales in that first week, but none since then.

Cathy Shugg, a certified crop consultant at Crop Production Services in South Deerfield, said abundant rain is good for the grass, but bad for farmers.

"Grass likes cool, wet weather," Shugg said. "That means that when the hay is cut, there is more of it, so it's harder to dry. Farmers will need a larger window of time to dry it."

Every day that farmers wait for the dry weather, the quality of the hay decreases, said Stephen Herbert, a professor of agronomy in the plant, soil and insect science department at the University of Massachusetts.

"All the rain we've had lately has caused many farmers to delay their harvest. Now, the hay in the field has matured and gone through the flowering process, and is now just getting more fibrous," Herbert said. "Fiber is harder for animals to digest, so for high-producing animals like dairy cows, over-mature hay is not as nutritious."

At the Fletcher Farm in Southampton, the lower-quality hay will force Fletcher to supplement the diets of the dairy animals to make up for the lack of nutrients, like protein, that are higher in hay harvested on time.

"A lot of farmers are also having problems because the hay that is cut and drying gets rained on, which lowers the quality even more," Herbert said, speaking of June's setbacks. "When hay gets rained on, a lot of the sugars are leached out of it, decreasing the energy value of the feed."

Looking to next cut

Now, farmers are trying to get the over-mature grass off the fields so they can cut more nutritious hay when the grass grows back.

Shugg said that unless they can mow the grass soon, they may only be able to get two harvests off the fields, instead of the three or four cuttings many were able to get last year.

"We're looking into chopping the grass and feeding it green," Fletcher said last week, before the skies broke. "It will be lower quality and we'll have to supplement it, but we just need to get the overripe crop off the field."

Besides feeding animals the grass fresh, farmers have few options while they wait for the weather to change. They can finely chop the grass and ferment it to make haylage or silage, but the lower-quality grass will decrease the feed's nutritional value. If cut hay is rained on and cannot be dried properly, it can be baled as mulch hay, which is a lower quality, inedible hay used in gardening or at construction sites.

And those are only options if farmers can actually get their tractors into the fields. "We had to use two tractors the other day, one with four-wheel-drive to pull the other one so we wouldn't get stuck," Fletcher said.

Driving tractors on wet fields can be dangerous, and can damage the crop. Even if farmers get three days to dry the hay, the field may need additional time to dry enough to be driven on.

On Monday morning, McCulloch, the Goshen man who sells hay commercially, was waiting for the dew to lift and hoping to make another 300 bales of hay.

Through June, his operation suffered significantly due to rain. "We're really hurting this year," McCulloch said. Before this weekend, he had made fewer than 300 bales and hadn't cut anything in about three weeks. "Only 10,000 more to go," he quipped.

McCulloch sells hay mostly to horse owners and knew that the quality of this cut would likely not be up to most horses' standards. At the weekly auctions where he sells his hay, McCulloch said farmers and buyers were all expressing the same worries.

"Everyone is in the same boat this year," McCulloch said. "Everyone wants good hay, but you take what you can get."