Haying for best color and most protein

Pearlmont Jerseys shine like trout

Vermont farmer watches for Canadian highs and manages to get four cuttings of hay

By Charlie Calley
May 1984

“1 like to start haying as soon after the first ofJune that l can,” says Merwyn Pearl of Pearlmont Farm in Barnet, Vermont.

“I listen closely to the weather forecasts and what I watch for are those big Canadian highs coming in from the Northwest. Those are the ones that can set right over us for two or three days and let us really make some hay.”

Pearlmont Farm sets on 500 acres on a hillside high above the Connecticut Valley. And from their hayfields, Merwyn, Eva, and their son William Pearl can look up from their work to gaze at the river and Mclndoes village below, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire beyond.

Most of the farm, nearly 400 acres of it, is woods, and provides a significant income from maple syrup, firewood and sawlogs. But the backbone of Pearlmont is the pastures and hay fields. These grow the main source of feed for a strikingly handsome, and productive, herd of purebred Jerseys, 58 milkers and 57 dry cows, heifers, calves and beefers.

The Pearlmont Jerseys don’t have the slightest idea what corn silage tastes like because in the 30 years the Pearls have been building their herd, they’ve never fed corn. Since Merwyn took over the operation from his father in 1955, the herd has prospered on a diet of hay, rowen, a 16 percent coarse grain ration, and some beet pulp. This has resulted in a DHIA rolling herd average of 12,300 lbs. with 605 lbs. of butterfat and a butterfat percentage of 4.9.

With that kind of production, the hay at Pearlmont Farm has got to be good, and it is. The University of Vermont tested last year’s hay at between 12 and 14 per cent protein, and the rowen tested at between 16 and 21 percent.

“I like to start mowing early in the morning with the haybine,” Merwyn says, ‘”then go over it an hour or two later with the tedder. The next day, rake and bale it, so that the hay is in by the afternoon of the second day. You keep your color that way and get the most protein. Merwyn and William, who has been working for his folks since graduating from high school eight years ago, take care of the mowing, tedding and raking. Eva handles the baling.

“We cut four crops of hay and rowen last year,” said Merwyn. “We got 1,200 bales on the fourth cutting, and that’s the first time we ever did that. We make between 22,000 and 25,000 bales a year.”

The Pearls like bales that weigh between 25 and 30 lbs. “The hay keeps better if it’s not baled too tight,” Merwyn said, “and we start so early that that’s important.” Besides what they fed to their own cows, the Pearls sold more than 100 tons of hay out of their barns over the Winter, on a cash and carry basis. By the first part of April, the last pick-up truck load had been sold. “There was a big demand for hay this year,” said Merwyn”. “I think one reason is that there’s less Canadian hay around. A lot of the Canadian hay has been going out West where they had a bad drought last Summer.”

“We got $1.50 a bale, but they weren’t the heavy bales,” he said. “We drop all our bales behind the baler and pick them up by hand. We always get two or three youngsters from the village to help out and they can handle the smaller bales better.”

The Pearls use all New Holland haying equipment and power their farm with a fleet of Farmalls that range in age from about five to 30 years. Merwyn still has the Farmall 200 he bought when he first started on his own in ’55. “It runs like a top and still saws all our wood.”

William and Eva Pearl with their prize Jersey Pearlmont Sleeping Geneva who in 1978 won first place for three year olds at The North American International Exposition. Geneva’s calf, Pearlmont St. Gayle, is at her side. T. Gllson photo

Located as it is on a stony hillside, the farm is more suited to growing hay than corn, says Merwyn, and one advantage of that is “You don’t have to have a silo or corn harvesting equipment. You don’t need such big tractors either. The biggest tractor I’ve got is 70 h.p.”

Hay is stored in their cow barn, in a nearby hay barn, and in a big barn they lease near the village. The main cow barn at Pearlmont Farm is an old post and beam structure, with a wooden floor, that is organized much as it was 100 years ago. Hay storage is up top, the cows are on the middle floor, and manure handling and storage below deck. A modern milkhouse is attached to the front of the barn.

A row of windows down the middle of the barn on the long South side allows sunlight to stream through onto the backs of the cows. Every animal is as clean as can be and shines like a trout, although they’ve been in a barn all Winter.

After a morning milking, the barn is completely silent, with the cows basking in the sun, and as a stranger enters, all eyes turn at once to watch. Merwyn points out one old cow he is especially proud of; Pearlmont Sleeping Geneva 93, who has produced milk with a butterfat percentage of 6.9. In 1978 she was chosen as an All-American three-year-old. “She’s the first All-American bred and owned on the same farm to come out of Vermont,” he said. “She’ll be nine years old in November and she’s still going strong. We had her dam before her and her grand dam.”

Merwyn and William handle all the barn chores, but Eva Pearl fills in as needed. Two Winters ago, when Merwyn was laid up, Eva took her husband’s place for two months. “I’d be lost without her,” says Merwyn. As for William, Merwyn says, “He’s a real worker. He’s always pushing me. I can’t keep up with him.”

The Pearl’s have a younger son, who works on the Robert Zambon farm in South Ryegate, Vt.; a daughter who teaches in Barnet and another daughter who works for the St. Johnsbury Trucking Co.

Merwyn points out that he used to keep his herd producing milk at a 5.4 percent butterfat content, then lowered it when milk handlers began to encourage production over butterfat. “Now they’re going back to butterfat and I’m looking for butterfat bulls, but there’s only about two in the whole country.”

The Pearls ship their milk to Agri-Mark and are worried because recently Agri-Mark has been pressuring them to move their cows off a wood floor. ”I guess we’ve got to do something about it,” said Merwyn of what will surely be a difficult problem to deal with.

“Agri-Mark has told us they’ve got 140 producers in Northern New England with wood floors,” said Eva, who thinks trying to force the end of wood floors in dairy barns amounts to discrimination against Jersey farms. “Holsteins are so big and heavy they can be trouble on a wood floor, but it’s the Jersey farmers who can still use the old barns.”

“l think Agri-Mark has just got too many Holstein directors,” says Merwyn. “Jerseys are small enough animals so they don’t need a cement floor.

“I wish Agri-Mark would pay us for protein. They say they’re studying it, but they never do anything about it. There are too many Holstein directors. Their argument is that there isn’t enough proof. But Cabot likes Jersey farmers because they’re big on cheese and it takes less Jersey milk to make a pound of cheese.”

Pearlmont Farm’s century old wooden barn with house beyond.

An advantage of a wooden floor, at least at Pearlmont Farm, is that it allows a cheap, efficient manure management system. The Pearls don’t have an automatic gutter cleaner. Instead, Merwyn and William shovel manure through trap doors in the wooden floor directly into the manure spreader below.

“We give the fields a light top dressing in the Fall, then spread lightly all over in the Spring.” They apply chemical fertilizer between the first and second cuttings and that feeds the third and fourth cuttings as well. “We put about a ton of lime on per acre every other year to keep the pH level dose to 6.5,” Merwyn said. “We have the soil tested by UVM and go by their recommendations.

“I’ve got fields here that haven’t been plowed for 40 years,” said Merwyn. He does plow and reseed about five acres a year, but this occurs mostly on the 40-acre hay piece the Pearls own beside the Connecticut River in Mclndoes. Oats are put in as a nurse crop then harvested and fed to the heifers. The Pearls reseed to a mixture of 50 per cent alfalfa and 50 percent timothy and brome grass. “We like the alfalfa to have some grass in it to help dry it out.”

Fast drying is important to the Pearls, who put up their hay early and quickly. When rain threatens to spoil a mowing, they spray a mixture of de-ionized water and propionic acid onto the hay as it is being baled to hasten drying. “If we’re baling too green we’ll use Beacon hay preserve,” says Eva. “It’ll keep the hay from spoiling and heating up in the barn.”

“I wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans without her,” says Merwyn of his wife, a Barnet native. “There’s more than one day she’s put up 2,000 bales. And boiling maple syrup–she does all the boiling. No one else can boil like Eva can. For one stretch this season, she’d start boiling at 5:30 in the morning and made 30 gallons a day for 10 days straight.”

Eva says another benefit of mixing timothy and brome grass with the alfalfa is that it is appreciated by their hay customers who keep horses and beef critters, animals that don’t require as much protein as milk cows and like the taste of the grasses.

On the other hand, Merwyn points out, “a lot of our customers like this high testing hay because they don’t have to buy so much grain.

“I think there’s a good future in selling hay because there’s so many people with horses and raising beef,” he said. “We sold it for a good many years for $1 a bale, then we went to $1.25 for a while, and this is the first year we’ve charged $1.50.”

Besides their retail businesses in hay, syrup and 75 cords of firewood a year, the Pearls sell heifers. They consign them to auctions and have sent animals to many states. Twelve were sent to California last year.

Twenty years of AI breeding is easy to see in these purebred Jersey heifers and they make a healthy contribution to farm income. Merwyn keeps a semen tank, “buys bulls” from around the country, and hires Eastern to do the inseminating. “I kept a bull the first two years I farmed,” Merwyn recalls, “but that was it. He threw me out six sets of twins that second year and I got rid of him. I bought a semen tank and put the bull right into hamburg,” which, by the way, is another source of income for this diversified family farm.

“We sell four to six beefers a year,” said Merwyn. “Some people prefer the taste of Jersey beef. That’s all we eat. We always have young cows that got injured or don’t produce well. A lot of people like to buy beef right from the farm so they know just what they’re getting.”

Merwyn thinks the price of local beef is on the upswing .

“l’ve got an idea there will be a shortage of western beef which might help the local price. Getting the beef price up would help ease the milk surplus too because then a lot of old milkers would go down the line.

“A rising beef price will take care of a lot of surplus. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a shortage of milk in a while. These things go in cycles.” ■

UPDATE 2025

Pearlmont Farm is still in the Pearl family, but no longer as a dairy farm. Today, like many other former dairy farms in New England, Pearlmont is a maple, beef and hay farm.