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Cheaper than buying seed and the equipment to plant seed. I don't have much room to roll out round bales because I'm mostly woods so I'm thinning the trees out to get more sun in and placing square bales out. After looking at the leftover, I'm going to start doing half bales and that should be just the right amount to just let it sit or spread it out just a little with a rake. I'm trying to reduce labor as much as possible even while I only have a few goats so I won't get overwhelmed when I have a lot of them.

For a little while, I was tossing bale after bale in the same spot. When I cleaned up the piles a couple of days ago that I had raked up 1-2 months ago, I found a bunch of 1/4" x 6" earth worms in them. The biggest worm I'd seen before that was 1/8" x 3-4" or about half size. The very bottom 1-2" layer right on top of the soil, actually looked like soil. They were eating hay and pooping soil.

I took all the piles I had and spread them about 3" thick in an area where nothing was growing except rocks. The rocks grown from flush with the ground to sticking up 3". In other words, I lost 3" of humus and top soil which happens wherever I disturb the soil. It's real bad around the perimeter of the fence where I drove the tractor over it dozens of times while building the fence. I need to get a chipper/shredder so that when I thin out the trees, I can chip the branches and mulch the rocky places with them, then place half bales on top and let the goats eat and spread them. All that placing of bales will be when there's not much for the goats to eat of course.

I've got 3-4 acres of fairly flat land with 1-2 foot of good top soil and the other 10+ acres is hilly and rocky. Gotta be careful in my transformation from forest else I'll just have rock. Some places will stay forest and the rest I'll thin out just enough to get enough sun to grow grasses, forbs, weeds etc. Keeping all the big acorn dropping oaks and plan to get pigs. Someday I'll have enough cleared to roll out the round bales. Need to make a custom bale trailer for my tiny tractor so I can get them on the back forty.

I'm watching Kiss the Ground, a documentary along the lines of the videos I linked to, narrated by Woody Harrelson of all people. All these new generation farmers believe in climate change but don't necessarily believe in living like we're back in the stone age to fight it. Some are taking over the family farm but they're not putting up solar panels. They just quit using the tractor, plowing and seeding all the time and are trying to mimic nature, moving animals across the land quickly, grazing 1/3 of the way down instead of down to 2" stubble, not brush hogging, trying to let the animals eat year round without hay as much as possible, rolling it out when they do etc. It seems to work.