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When The Cattle And The Hayfield Call
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Article
by Raylene Nickel
Photos by Mike Boyatt
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Donnie Fryhover never did mind hard work.
He grew up working alongside his father in Oklahoma farm
fields. That’s probably why, as a teenager, he saw
a golden opportunity in a hayfield. When he was 16 he bought
a pickup and started hiring himself out to haul square bales
for other people.
Even when the farm boy went away to college
and became a school- teacher, his mind never strayed far
from his father’s farm, the cattle, and the hayfields
back home. He wanted a cowherd of his own, so he built one
from scratch while he continued to teach school.
Getting Started
First, he bought day-old heifers to raise
on bottles, then grazed them in leased pastures. To harvest
hay, he bought used equipment. Today, 800 head of cattle
graze his pastures near Monroe, Oklahoma, and he custom
harvests forages on 3,000 acres.
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Donnie Fryhover, professional Oklahoma custom
hay harvester
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For 14 years Donnie ran between three jobs...teaching,
taking care of cows, and custom harvesting, all the while building
his own operation. “He would custom hay in summers when he wasn’t
teaching, but we would usually still have hay to harvest after school
started back up in the fall,” his wife, Linda, said. “So
in the afternoons at the end of each school day Donnie would go back
out to the hayfields and work until dark.” Then, somewhere along
the line, school teaching lost out to farming.
The haying business grew as their cowherd increased.
Donnie soon found his old equipment wasn’t up to harvesting the
amount of hay his cattle needed. So he bought new equipment. To make
payments on the equipment, he started custom-harvesting for others.
“Then more people began asking me to bale hay for them,”
he said. “Pretty soon, we were baling hay all over the countryside.”
Nine Tractor Operation
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Fryhover, working on baler with Pony Blaylock.
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Nine tractors are now used in his work along with
two round balers and two square balers. With the able help of
eight employees, he puts up 9,000 round bales and 25,000 square
bales each summer.
Donnie realizes that machinery breakdowns are
critical in a business where clients typically “want everything
done yesterday,” he said. “We’ve always got a
piece of equipment ready to step in and replace a machine that
breaks down. We’ve built a pretty good reputation for ourselves
because we try to get the work done quickly. Ten years ago we
were putting up a third of what we put up now.”
“One of the hardest things is getting to
people’s places during that window of time in which they
want their hay cut,” Linda said. To schedule work as efficiently
as possible, Donnie considers the differences in drying times
between the various forages his clients want harvested. “Prairie
hay cures fast,” he pointed out, “while hay that’s
been fertilized with chicken manure takes longer to dry. Sweet
clover, of course, is best baled while it still has some moisture
in it, so the leaves don’t shatter.”
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The Long Haul
“We really have to run to get it all done,”
Donnie added. “Especially in cases where customers are located
40 to 50 miles away. To put up hay on one big operation a long way
from home, we haul our equipment there and stay for a whole week or
so, until we get the haying completed.”
Donnie follows basic haymaking rules to assure high
quality: he cuts forages before they mature. After it’s cured,
he rakes and bales as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of
it being rained on and losing nutrition. “The longer hay lies
in the field, the more protein it loses,” he said.
To be sure he can “make hay while the sun shines,”
the hours of early morning dew are utilized by taking care of maintenance
and sharpening sickle knives. Donnie’s haying system depends
on cutting with sickle mowers.
Net Wrap Preferred
On round bales, he uses plastic net wrap in place of
twine. Many of his customers prefer the net wrap to twine because
it helps retain forage quality. “I was the first custom hay harvester
in this area to use the net wrap,” he said. Like a hair net,
“it holds the leaves down and helps the bale shed rain more efficiently.
It reduces quality losses from rain damage by about 25 percent. And
it’s easy to remove for feeding. It just peels away from the
bale.”
Custom haying dovetails nicely with the Fryhovers’
cattle business because some clients offer a share of their hay crop
as payment. “The clients we work with on this basis are usually
flexible enough to let us leave our bales in the field until after
the haying season is over,” Linda said.
When the haying season is over, Linda and Donnie haul
round bales home from their clients’ fields. Each drives a one-ton
truck with a long trailer. Come winter, there are more bales to haul,
as many as 120 round bales a day to feed their own cows in 13 different
leased pastures, some as far as 20 miles from home.
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Donnie Fryhover’s haying crew, from left,
Luke Williams, Pony Blaylock, Doug Evans, and Fryhover.
Donnie Fryhover, professional Oklahoma custom hay harvester
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Winter Feeding
Much of the hay fed to their own cattle in winter
is low-protein prairie grass. They supplement it with high-protein
cubes (ground corn, salt, and cottonseed) in self-feeders. The
20 percent protein in the cubes aids the cows in digesting low-protein
hay more efficiently. The goal for each cow is two to three
pounds of the cubes each day. A high salt content in the cubes
helps to limit the amount any one cow will eat.
Over the years it has been difficult to find sufficient
pastureland near their home to buy or lease. They lease 2,600
acres of grassland for their 800 cows.
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A low-management and low-labor system seems to work
with their cattle. Bulls run with the herd year-round. Calves are
rounded up each fall and hauled directly to a local auction barn.
Family Business
Now 52, Donnie couldn’t have done it all alone.
On some mornings during the early years he would be busy scribbling
study plans on schoolroom blackboards while Linda would be at home
bottle-feeding calves. Linda is a full-blown partner in the operation,
hauling round bales home from the fields and checking cows in the
scattered pastures they lease.
“I never dreamed I would be doing this
for a living,” said Linda, who was raised in town and
never cared for animals larger than cats or dogs.
The Fryhovers 19-year-old daughter, Ahna,
did most of the raking for her father during her summers
in high school.
Sometimes it seems to the Fryhovers as if
they’ve been working from sunup until sundown for years
without much of a letup. The long drought that lingered
in their area last year caused losses in production of both
their hay and cattle businesses.
“But we enjoy what we do, and we like
working for ourselves,” Donnie said. “I feel as
if I’ve come a long way from the days when I was a
kid hauling with a pickup.”
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The young lady climbing into the tractor is
Fryhover’s daughter, Ahna, who has been his dependable
rake specialist during the summer.
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