KINGSTON — Gary Gordon is the undisputed hay king of Eastern Ontario. In his own stomping grounds of Frontenac County he earned 17 first prizes and 3 second prizes for his potatoes, barley and hay at the local hay and seed show. Those 20 samples went to the Ottawa Valley Farm Show last month where he earned first, second or third prize in 17 categories. He placed first in six hay categories. He had the overall grand champion hay exhibit but he says the highest honour was earning grand champion for hay quality using a bale of first-cut alfalfa. It was the fifth time he earned that honour since 2001. He likes this category because lab tests prove the quality of the hay. "The protein was over 24.8 per cent on dry hay," he said, of his winning entry. "It wasn’t quite as high as last year. Last year, I was 27 per cent but still no one could touch me."The grinning 42-year-old dairy farmer, who milks 60 head on 500 acres with his 84-year-old father, Gerald, just north of Kingston, says that since "I keep winning these competitions" word-of-mouth has generated a nice niche market for horse hay. Farmers often ask him: How do you get such great hay?
He says there’s no secret to it. "It’s timing," he said, adding, "I just feed it and cut it." When pressed a little, he admits that if you know when to harvest you’ve got an edge. He also has good land. "We soil test so we know exactly what we need in the soil," he said. "We have a lot of loamy ground with good tile drainage. That helps. Alfalfa likes loamy ground."

Here’s his 5-step approach to great hay:

1. Pick the seed
He starts with top quality seed that he grows on test plots – two or three at a time – and watches how well they grow on his land. Two years down the road he picks his new seed.

2. Seed bed preparation. "We try to work with minimum tillage. That means one pass over with a disc, then one pass over with cultivator with rollers behind it. Then we fertilize and plant and we have a packer behind the drill so its all done in one pass. Then you wait and hope for rain."

3. The cover crop and fertilizer
We plant barley as a cover crop. We put both seeds in the ground at once. We harvest the barley in August. Alfalfa is harvested the following year. We add fertilizer in the Spring to get the yield out of it. If you get the weather you can harvest every 30 days and get three cuts.

4. Harvest time
This is what gives him the edge, he says. "We cut it when it’s fully budded. I’ll go until midnight. I might get four or five hours of sleep some nights. Then, I’ll go again between milking. It takes about two weeks to get off 350 acres of hay. You only have a small window of opportunity. When it starts to flower, every day you leave it in the field, the protein content drops. Everyone knows this but everyone runs their show differently. Everyone has their own theories."

5. The goal
"If we get the higher protein we can produce cheaper milk, rather than buy supplement," he says, noting that each year he chops 600 tonnes of haylage and stores it in Agbags. "It pays off."

When competing for top quality hay it’s important to know what the judges are looking for, he said. "They look for maturity, colour and odour, leaf content, weeds and texture. I don’t take any weeds out. I spray. I’ve never had to take a weed out of a sample. The most important thing is: look and color. Fertilizer does it and cutting at the right time so it doesn’t get bleached with the sun. You don’t want to get it too dry because then it gets brittle and you lose your leaves. Odour is next – a musty smell and you’re out.