HAYING SEASON ON THE FARM

July has arrived this year after a blistering June which ended with temperatures in the 90s. Growing up on a farm, the muggy nights and heat waves during the day were part of farm life.

The scorching summer weather meant it was haying season. It meant that farm kids had the hot, sticky job of handling and storing those prickly rectangles of bound hay, tied with twine and full of itchy hayseeds, called bales. There is a particular smell to a haying operation. It’s the inviting sweet scent of dried clover and other grasses, tinged with the scent of gasoline from farm equipment. The work is hard and tiresome. We handled hundreds of bales kicked out from a baler, pulled by our Farmall C tractor.

If we were lucky, the baler was hitched to the tractor and the hay wagon hooked behind it. We only had to pull the bales up onto the wagon bed as they popped out and stack them four layers high before hauling the load to the barn for storage. Two-string bales can weigh anywhere from 40 to 75 pounds, depending upon the type of hay, how seasoned or dry it is, and how the baler is set to compact them.

Before we owned a hay baler that fed the bales onto the wagon, they were dropped onto the ground. Then, we’d have to toss them up onto the hay wagon first before stacking and carting them away.

In the barnyard, an elevator with a chain mechanism and paddles took the bales up to the very stifling mow where they were…(wait for it)…restacked once again. If I was lucky, I had the job of feeding the elevator below in the hot sun and would get a break from working the even hotter mow. Needless to say, we all vied for that open-air spot.

My father was particular about how he wanted his hay stored. The bales had to be stacked cut-side down in the mow. I always felt we were giving more attention to this hot sticky—and somewhat finicky—stacking routine than I cared to give.

Why cut-side down? Because the strings/twine will always be on the side of the bale when you look at the stack. It is said to also deter mice from gnawing on the twine, but it also allows moisture to run down through the stack to the bottom layer. Much

later, baler twine was treated with a chemical that discouraged barn mice. I do admit, come winter, when you have to throw bales down the shoot to feed the herd below, it was easier to walk on a layer of hay uniformly stacked.

Someone once asked me if I miss summer and haying season on the farm. A friend, who’s a farm kid as well, put it more eloquently than I ever could: “Be careful of the past, it always looks better than it was.”

Here's hoping July and your summer is a good one!

 

  

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