Mulch History

As a new worker at Wheatland Vegetable Farms back in May of 2005, my first summer job as a college music student who knew nothing of farming, it felt like my first days and weeks there were filled with mulching. We mulched with those giant round bales you see in fields on the side of the road, pushing them out to unroll the 700lb bales down the aisles between rows of tomatoes, squash, and peppers. A third-year worker showed me how thick to keep it, how to feel the edge of the bale to tell the smooth direction or the pokey direction that indicated the way it needed to face to unroll properly. “Unroll” is a generous description of the process; although the baler rolled up the windrow of dried grass around and around like a carpet until the bale reached about 5' in diameter, and 4' wide, it never unrolled quite so easily. This was mulch hay, not high-quality horse hay; full of weeds or briers, or had been rained on and maybe gotten moldy, or was otherwise not fit to be fed to cattle, and sold for $10 a bale. Occasionally we were surprised by a nest of ground bees or an unfortunate rabbit that had got caught up in the baler. Since the 20-acre farm used so many bales all at once in the spring, before the new year's hay had yet been baled, Jay Merchant delivered rows of bales in the fall to stockpile over winter for use in the spring—and from sitting, they inevitability developed a flat spot, making them all the more difficult to push out. It was hot, heavy, dusty work.  Somehow it didn't even occur to any of us to wear gloves.

Most mornings that time of year began with mulching for everyone, before some groups were siphoned off for smaller or more specialized tasks. Knowing nothing yet myself, I was often one of the ones left to continue mulching. The reason for mulching was, at the most basic, to use a cheap, readily-available, natural materiel to block weeds from growing. And it added significant amounts of organic matter to the soil and protected vegetables from rain-spattered mud. Mulching also provided a unifying identity for the farm; it was a difficult job that everybody did and a practice that few similar vegetable farms employed. We heard once of a former worker who'd gone up as far north as New York State, and, upon telling of where they had worked down here, were greeted with--”oh yes, the mulch farm!”

The reason for our outlier status was our location here in an outlier agricultural area, one which had recently been entirely rural, but was turning over to houses as development pressure crept west. At that time there were acres and acres no longer being farmed for crops, in some sense waiting to be planted to houses, whose owners needed to take advantage of the “ag use” tax benefit from producing some sort of agricultural product on their land—and there were enough farmers of the old generation still around to make the hay, which was produced in such quantity that the price was kept low. It worked out that they were hired to hay the fields, and basically needed a place to put the bales. We were that place for a lot of it.

So, when I started farming on my own, I also used hay for mulching—at first in the exact same round-bale system, and then later with square bales, which could work with the narrower aisles resulting from the narrower tractor system I'd worked out to make more efficient use of space. Mulch was the system I learned, and mulch was the system I used. Still heavy, hot, dusty, hard—and never quite 100% weed control with all the Johnson grass and thistles. Jay Merchant still delivered the bales and mostly did the unloading himself, whether tipping the round bales off the trailer or stacking 100 square bales up tall and straight, interlocked so the stack wouldn't collapse. After watching a few times, I got to where I could make an all-right stack, and he tossed the 40lb bales from the trailer up to me to arrange on top of the stack. It felt like we were two people sharing the work, but even though he was over 70 and more than twice my age I knew he was doing most of the work throwing them so high; I was just doing the arranging. I did my best to keep up.

Eventually Jay came one time and told me he was retiring from making square bales, on account of their being too much hassle to move around anymore. I couldn't blame him. I went back to the list of phone numbers of mulch sources that I'd photocopied from my now-landlords' farm records, and worked down the list. Mostly these people, by now, were long retired (if not dead), and none knew where to send me.

As luck would have it I reached one man south of Leesburg, who I'd never heard of, but who did indeed have square bales—a giant stack of perhaps 800 or 1000 bales, under a tarp some years old, but still good hay he said, and cheap at $1.50 if I could move them myself. He was still at it making square bales, but he was a person to have all manner of mechanization to make squares easy to handle, I don't think he touched them once by hand from baling to stacking. But while we were chatting, as I handed him the check after loading up with a relative of a neighbor I'd hired, he told me how it was getting too dangerous to drive tractors down the road anymore, and how he was probably about to stop. His impression was that new people moving into the houses built on those former hayfields were glad to live in a rural area, but impatient with slow tractors on the rural roads. That giant haystack proved to be a two-year supply for my farm, and even though he gave me the old tarp they'd been stored under, still they ended up pretty rotten and full of snakes on the bottom layer setting on the ground.

After that stash ran out, I got along for a few years on luck and Valley Trader listings, or Craigslist, buying 50 or 100 bales here and there for cheap from people looking to clear the last of their prior year's bales out of the barn to prepare for the new-cut hay. It was a lot of driving, and a lot of packing bales into the 1997 U-haul truck that I had at the time for deliveries. When that truck died and turned into a shed on the farm I was happy to give it up. To my dismay, however, the only source of square bales I could find was a longtime Lovettsville farmer, who'd had nice bales the whole time but for more money than I wanted to spend. Now I was desperate having no other source, and so I paid him the $3.50, and then $3.75 per bale. At least he did the stacking & delivery.

By this time, about 5 years ago, economic and demographic change had come to the area. Those hay fields had turned to houses, no longer in need of land-use taxation, and that generation of farmers had pretty well gone away, with few folks left to fill that haymaking economic niche, even if there had been still hay to make. Agricultural change had also had come to the farm: I heard from a former neighbor in one of our yearly catch-up phone calls that he had begun using a thin landscape fabric, newly marketed in the produce-supply catalogs for laying down between crop rows, fulfilling the weed-blocking purpose of hay mulch. It was easy to put down even in hot weather and as fast as mulching with hay, blocked weeds 100%, and could be reused over and over again. I was beginning to find hay bales too hot, too dusty, too ineffective—the people who worked here were feeling the same way. And to my (continuing) surprise, the one-time cost to buy the fabric was the same as buying a one-year supply of hay bales at current rates. I didn't like—still don't, really—how it isn't a natural material from down the road and doesn't add organic matter to the soil, but there's no arguing with the benefits. We've gotten to where I've built a machine to roll the fabric up again, and learned to put it down in just 15 or 20 minutes a row—mulching the same amount with hay would take about an hour.

A year or two ago, in October, Jay Merchant called me up to say he had a truckload of square bales he'd made for his church's Halloween festival, for benches and all, and so they'd been set outside but really were fine. Did I want to have them? He really was just looking for a place to put them. Although I wasn't buying hay anymore, sure, I figured I'd take them for free. After all, it was garlic planting time and, of all things, garlic is traditionally grown under a thick blanket of mulch. I figured I'd do just that, since the bales were free and all. Jay came with his truck and trailer, and his grandson to unload. Jay stayed in the truck; his grandson and I dropped the bales down the garlic rows as he drove along. It turned out the garlic shoots came up faster than expected, and I missed the window for mulching them. Those free bales were still in the field, though, and had to be collected, transported, stacked, and stored in a greenhouse-style shelter for use on next fall's garlic. Over the winter, a windstorm destroyed the shelter and tore all the grommets out of the new tarp I'd put over it. The free bales survived under the tarp laid over the stack with sandbags, until they went straight-away in the spring to a neighbor.

I've so far kept my vow never to have a bale on the farm again.