Hay Day 2020

On Thursday, November 5th, we got word from our neighbor down the road that they would be baling hay.  This is good Bermuda hay.  Many people buy it for their horses.  This hay is for our milk cows.  If we wanted hay, we were to be in the field anytime after 3 pm on Friday to pick it up.  They give us a deal.  If we pick it up behind the baler and load it all ourselves, it is $5 per bale.  It has been that price for as long as I can remember.

I left work and sped back home to be in the field before the sun started going down.  The day was a gorgeous, the skies blue with a few wisps of cotton-like clouds above us.  The hay field had been freshly-mown, the grass uniformly cut, raked and baled.  The square bales dotted the acreage in precise, orderly rows.

Russ was at work and Benjamin was at work.  The number of our farm laborers is diminishing rather quickly, but that's okay.  Tricia and I are up to this task.  Work like this keeps us young... or so we try to tell ourselves.  The division of labor goes like this.  Tricia drives the truck.  I walk along behind.  She stops at each bale.  I pick up the bale and neatly stack in the trailer.  As I pick up each bale, I holler out the count and Tricia repeats it.  Easy enough.

The bales are loaded into the old cattle trailer.  This trailer was my grandfather's.  He purchased it in 1978.  I was 12 years old.  The old trailer is like a Timex watch or the Energizer bunny.  It needs a paint job and a few repairs, but it still gets the job done.

We count the bales because we are going to get 70 bales this year.  Approximately 90 fit into our hay loft.  Last year we purchased around 90 and still have 5 bales left.  As we pick up hay bales the old-fashioned way, our neighbor is ahead of us with a fancy "hay-picker-upper."  It picks up the hay, lines the bales up neatly, and flips them over onto the wagon.  The bales are neatly stacked and ready to be placed in the barn.  Automation.  

Here is the driver of our hay-picking up operation.  She is a cruel task-master.  I jest, I jest.  She handed me bottles of water to keep me hydrated and did an excellent job of keeping the truck lined up.  She stopped just when she needed to so that I would be able to pick the bales up and stack them in the cattle trailer.

We filled the trailer and then filled the truck.  It was work, but it was work that made you feel alive.  We got exactly 70 bales loaded.  The truck groaned under the weight, but we slowly made it out of the field and two miles down the road and to our house.

I was unsure if I could pull the trailer into the pasture without bogging down so I unhooked the trailer and drove truckload after truckload back to the barn.

The truck was backed up under the doors of the hayloft.  We used a rope and pulley to hoist the bales up into the loft.  Tricia attached the hooks of the bungee cord to the twine on the bales and I began to pull...

When I got the bale even with the door opening, I hooked the rope onto a nail to hold it in place.

I swung the bale into the loft and removed the bungee cord, sliding the bale into the loft and stacking them up neat and tidy.

When all 70 were pulled into the barn, we rejoiced!

The hay is in the barn.  The loft is like a pantry.  The cows have a stockpile of hay to get them through the winter while the grass in the pasture is dormant and not growing.  Another year of hay gathering all wrapped up!