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Kalberweidli is an organic (Bio), grass fed beef farm located in central Switzerland.
Join me as I explore what it's like to Farm The Alps.
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https://www.kalberweidli.ch/

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it might look like we're cutting hay but we're not we're cutting something totally different we're cutting

remember back in those videos where we were cutting hay it was nice and Tall which makes sense This Tall Grass makes a lot of hay but then you look at what we're cutting today and it's really short it's barely anything and this is something that people have asked me about why do farmers go out and cut hay when the grass is still so short I mean they're barely making any hay and they could just wait until the grass was fully grown and then they would have to cut less often it' be less work and save more time I mean do farmers just like not have anything better to do well they probably do but when we look at grass we see grass it's nothing special you cut it you feed it to the animals it makes them big and strong basically but unfortunately it's just not that simple cows and other animals get all of their vitamins minerals and other nutritional needs from the grass grass has a nutritional value just like fluff now if you don't know what fluff is uh that's okay it's a substance that is used to make a fluffy Nutter which is a piece of heaven on Earth now unlike a jar of fluff grass doesn't come with a nutritional label but it has a nutritional value and not all grasses have the same nutritional value so this is finished I'm going to come back later and cut what we can't cut with the Machine by hand um just the ground here is really bad and and uh it's pretty steep the rest of this bank I'm going to use a good old fashion scthe here um before moving to Switzerland I thought these things were extinct just for the walls of the Cracker Barrels but it turns out at least in Switzerland they still get quite a bit of use uh I'm not a great Scythe operator uh they require quite a bit of skill to use um and I don't have any of that skill so watch and make fun of me I

guess

all right so that is finished now it's not perfect but it's American Quality uh so I'm calling it done anyways um Eric's father is going to finish uh trimming all the way around all the posts and everything Eric's on the Abbey over there finishing up the last of the field here and I think we have another field to cut today I'm not sure 3 days later the stuff we cut at the beginning of the video is ready to be picked up we're going to pick that up in the afternoon once the Dew Burns off but uh in the morning here we're cutting some more so I'm edging around this field with the Swiss um Eric's down there with the Abby cutting already and then after I'm done with the Swiss I'm going to take the Manta and do this bank right over here got these Banks right here I've switched to the Manta quite a bit wider than the Swiss so get done a little bit faster and Eric put a brand new blade on here so should be cutting like a dream so I can change my steering mode here right now it steers with the handlebars but I can change it into steering with the the hand grips here or I can do like a free floating steering or it doesn't Ste at

all now there are different types of grasses that Farmers plant and different types of grasses will have different nutritional values but that's a whole separate topic and it's not the only Factor grass has a life cycle and its nutrition changes based on its age this is the okah Hoy that we were cutting in an earlier video it's tall and there's a lot of it but it's also older and when we look at the hay that it produces it's kind of a golden color if we look through here there not so many Blades of grass but there are a lot of stems the stems make the grass nice and Tall but they're
nd of hard for animals to digest they're not very nutritious and cows don't really like them now compare this okoy to the young grass that we're cutting today it looks so green and juicy it kind of even looks a little bit tasty like something you would want to put in your salad in Switzerland this is called Ed instead of waiting for the grass to fully mature like you would with hay the grass is cut earlier in its life cycle if we look at the hay it produces it's very soft and much greener than the hay we also see a lot more of the grass leaves and very few stems this results in a much more nutritious feed that is easier to digest and it tastes good at least cows think so now in English at least American English we don't say hey and Ed instead we use First second third fourth cutting the first cutting would be what the Swiss would call hay