I saw the hay just down the road from the Millarville
Racetrack getting cut on Saturday.
Yay! It’s hot, it’s windy, it
will dry fast maybe get baled without rain.
Haying season is a big deal in rural communities. It’s part of why farmers are obsessed with the
weather. Around here it starts in early July and can go
into September. I grew
up in a haying family and it was all about the bloom on the alfalfa or the
timothy, you don’t want it too mature because the leaves and blooms fall off
and the nutritional content drops. But
you don’t want to cut too early as there isn’t enough bloom yet. But is it going to rain? So do we cut?
What’s the weather forecast? So
you cut with a hay bine- a machine that cuts and then sends the hay through a
crimper so it squishes the stems and it dries faster.
Those rows of cut hay in the fields in that
fabulous round and round pattern are called swaths. Once
the top half is dry it gets raked.
Sometimes gets raked two swaths into one, if the crop wasn’t very thick. Really great hay that was cut at the perfect
time and baled without rain often goes into square bales. These are prime feed for cattle or
horses. Hay that isn’t as good, maybe has a
bit of rain, gets rolled up into the big round bales- those big cinnamon buns
out in the fields. Big round bales are
great for speed of baling and for feeding cows out in the fields in the winter,
but you need machinery to handle them.
My dad and grandpa used to square bale and round bale depending on the
quality. Some farmers round bale great hay because that's the way they like to do it. There have been a lot of
innovations in haying over the last century from loose hay stacked with
pitchforks on hay wagons and loaded into the lofts of barns, to square bales
that get stooked (stacked in a pyramid on a sled and then dumped off) as the
square bales come out. In this video
they are picking the bales up off the field after they’ve been baled. My dad had a hay hook like this (maybe
farmers are part pirate?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNE-845YhQ4
Now there are bale wagons that get driven around the field and
pick up the bales, form them into a stack and can unload them into the
hayshed. Then they get picked up again
in a stack to deliver.
My dad would not
have the Popeye arms that he has today with that kind of equipment! He used to have the hay wagon but then had to
unload them out of the hay shed onto trucks or flat decks for delivery. Sometime he used a hay elevator- a ramp with a conveyor belt that would carry
the bale up to the top.
It’s still great fun to climb, run and jump from round bale
to round bale or to lay on your back on the top of a stack of square bales and stare
up at the clouds on a hot summer day. But
only if it’s cool with the farmer or rancher because good hay is like
gold. I see hay as solar power
storage. It’s an amazing process that
has humble grasses, and alfalfa turn sun, rain and soil into winter food for
cattle, sheep, goats, horses and other herbivores. Even
though humans can’t eat hay these animals have evolved their digestive systems
to turn that hay in to meat, milk, fibre and horse love.
I invite you to take a closer look at the green fields of “just
grass” and the patterns of swaths in the
fields. Take a look at the sky and worry
about the haying weather for a minute. Open
the windows wide and breathe in the aroma of drying (curing) hay and give the
farmer on the baler a wave. Thanks for
the solar conversion!
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