Alfalfa is the best hay for baling if you can grow it. It is harder to dry down, works better with a more spendy mower-conditioner to dry it quicker, but it regenerates more tonnage more faster than anything else, and needs no N fertilizer. It dies use a lot of P & K and micro nutirients tho. It doesn't like wet roots or low spots with heavy soils. You should get 2 or 3 or 4 cuttings from it every year depending how far north you are, how soon your weather warms up, how even your summer rainfall is. It has leaf hoppers & aphids that like to mess it up, need to spray for the bugs if that becomes a cronic outbreak in your area.
Clover makes a good mix for a pasture to graze. It does not regrow fast enough to make good hay, and it dries down kind odd, hard to get it good for a bale all by itself. It's not worth planting to bale, much better options. Sure doesn't hurt if some is in the hay ground, not worth trying to make a pure stand to bale tho.
Grass hay one will bale once or twice a year, first cutting ends up stemmy & rained on, over ripe most of the time. 2nd cutting ends up tender & fine and good protien.
Horse people are fantics about having this all just so, and paying a king's ransom for thier own version of perfect hay.
For us cattle & sheep growers, forget allt hat perfect crap.
A mixed field of some grasses, some legumes works well for baling. They help each other to give you a good reliable feed source year in and year out.
Mixed grass & alfalfa is hard to get growing - the alfalfa takes over the first year, then slowly dies year after year as the grass takes hold. In 7 years you';ll have a mostly greass hay field.
Mixed grass & clover is good. The clover tends to have good years and bad years, you will see more or less clover year to year.
You rely on the grass in the mix for fiber & bulk. The legume in the mix (alfalfa or clover) helps add protien, add digestability, and puts nitrogen back into the soil for the grass to use.
As you cut & rake, they will dry themselves together into the proper moisture content. Each cutting will end up with a different mix of too ripe, or just right alfalfa & grass, or clover & grass. Some seasons the grass will stall out, and you get a thin cutting of alfalfa. Other years the bugs will devistate the alfalfa, but the grass will be gorwing ok.
Birds foot trefoil is a very specialty crop used for some grazing situations. It does work well, and a few added to your pasture won't be a bad thing in any event. Pretty yellow blossoms if you let it grow.
Corn stalks I mentioned earlier are just that - corn stalks spit out behind the combine, cattle graze them eating up the leaves & husks and fallen ears of corn. Around here 1000's of acres of stalks are baled now, to be part of the feed for cattle in feedlots.
It is difficult to do both hay & pasture on 5 acres. Will you have the neighbor's 2 acres, or more, available for some time in the future? In my brain any such deal can be fun, but it needs to return more than it costs to be fun. That will be difficult on 5 or 7 acres. If you get to 10, then being self-sufficient on the hay with both pasture & hay ground starts to work 'here'.
Would would be great is to have (5) 2-acre pastures, and rotate your livestock through them. In spring as hay grows faster than the critters can eat it, you mow & bale 2 or so of the pastures. This would be a typical livestock mostly-grass fed system. You would overseed some legumes into your current hay, and the rotational livestock and mowing every other year or so will build up the grasses in short time, no need to plant more grass.
That would be ideal, but you are limited by the size of your land. I know, one has what one has & has to make it work out. You're just a tad small to make the payments & produce enough..... Heck, i greaze out parts of the lawn and around buildings here on the farm to help with the pasture, whatever one can use.
--->Paul
