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Any possibility you could get one of the neighbors to throw a temporary fence around it and turn their cattle in? A couple dozen cows on that five acres for a week or two would maul over the grass pretty good, and leave you some free fertilizer. It depends on how much green bottom there is in the grass, and whether there is a usable source of water. I just finished doing that two weeks ago on ten acres of good grass, and another five of rough on rented ground. I abandoned the idea of haying it, too late, pretty old and rank, and the rockiest fields on my list. My neighbor already grazes some of my fields in the fall, so the cattle were just over the fence already. The neighbor down the road let us run a garden hose to a water tank, I ran the bush-hog around the outside to make it easier to run the wire, and it took about half a day to put up fence. There was some feed left after the cattle were off. With a permanent fence we could have left the cattle on it for another week, feeding a litttle hay if needed to keep them happy, and they would have cleaned up the rest of it. I clipped every thing left with the sickle bar, spreading spreading the manure to some extent, but it would have been fine if I had not. The whole thing gave me a little salvage value for the crop, cleaned up the grass so it won't bother next year, gave me a little fertilizer, and fulfilled my agreement to keep the land mowed off. I have been doing something similar on the home farm for a number of years, letting the cattle in on any hayland that wasn't mowed by mid-September, usually it is second or third cut that has come along too late or too short to be worth mowing.
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