Haying

Mowing and Raking

The tractor was small, no cabs, open to the sun, birds, bugs, smells, and wind. It was all manageable. The mower was a 7 or 9 foot sickle mower. That's all one had to contend with. Well, sometimes we also pulled a side rake behind it. The side rake was about 9 feet in width too.

The sickle of the mower clattered as it whipped quickly back and forth within the guard. It only moved about 6 inches, but it went very fast, and sliced down that prairie grass, or alfalfa into a flat sheet behind it.

Very similar to our mowers.

It was fun to watch, almost mesmerizing. There was standing hay along the right side of the tractor. (The mower sickle stuck out on the right, past the wheel of the tractor.) That hay stood up straight and tall - until the mower got to it. Suddenly it fell over flat on the ground, slick and silent. There it was, all in perfect unison, lying down backwards, relaxed and waiting.

The hay stayed that way, resting and drying for a day or two. Depended on the weather. It was better to have the hay fairly dry before baling. Otherwise, wet hay baled up very tightly and still wet, sometimes generated enough heat to smolder, or even catch fire. Even if it didn't leap into flames, the nutritive value of the hay would be lost.

I came back a few days later. That is, if it hadn't rained. Central South Dakota is dry country, with a relatively low humidity, so it didn't take long for the hay to dry out enough.

I had the same small tractor. This time to mower was removed, and a side rake was attached. Raking was absolutely the freest job to do on the farm. It was my favorite kind of field work. The rake didn't have to be turned on or off, raised or lowered, sped up or slowed down. I could ignore it. It ran via gears connected to it's two wheels. Whenever the rake moved in the field, the raking mechanism turned also. Piece of cake!

Just like our side rakes.

I went round and round the field. I set the hand throttle so I didn't go too fast because that would throw the leaves off the stalks and lose the nutrition in the hay. The cows would need that in the winter for fuel to keep them warm from the blizzards and cold.

Even with the pop-popping of the tractor, (It was a little John Deere with a two-cylinder engine. Those of you who know what I'm talking about - know.) and the clatter of the rake as it whirled around in its frame, I could hear the sounds of the wildlife that surrounded me.

There was the call of the hawks as they hunted the mice, voles, gophers and rabbits. There was also the corresponding cries of those rodents and rabbits when the talons seized them. It wasn't horrifying or frightening. It was the way of the world. It was the way hawks fed themselves and their families. It was the way rodents and rabbits were prevented from overwhelming the planet. (Still, I was glad I couldn't see it happen.)

Less often I saw the flash of red foxes as they pursued their hunting too. Staying near the farmer in the field worked well for all hunters. The mower and the rake regularly flushed small game and those predators were smart enough to have figured that out generations ago.

I was always intrigued by the small birds like sparrows and blackbirds harassing the hawks. A half dozen of them would gang up on a hawk. The hawk was much bigger, but those little birds were agile fighter planes against a lumbering bomber. They slipped and slid all around the hawk.

A favorite trick was to hit the hawk from above, on it's back. They served as a great example of the power of numbers. I wonder if there was a Sparrow Union? Eventually, the hawk surrendered and land on the upper branches of a tree. The hawk could not beat the little birds, or outlast them. Go little birds!!

Even though the sun beat down, and the temperature was high, it didn't seem so bad. We always made sure to have enough water, usually in a thermos left under a tree at the edge of the field. When I noticed thirst, I drove the tractor to the water thermos, got off and had a drink. I might stand there for a moment or two, stretch, look around, enjoy the neat and orderly windrows of hay making a square spiral around the field.

Bathroom breaks happened too, of course. There were no porta-potties. If there wasn't a grove of trees to use as a bathroom, there was always the big, rear wheel of the tractor to provide cover from any prying eyes. Being spotted was rare though, because there wasn't much traffic of any kind out there. Any passersby were almost certainly farm people too. They all knew that if the driver was off the tractor, and had disappeared behind that rear wheel, they ought to give her or him a moment to come back out.

Farm work. Ahhhh. It was sweet to me. Solitary, except for all the animals and daydreams. I will always miss it, and I am grateful I had the opportunity to be there and have those soft, warm, contented memories.

Hay Stacks

Mowing and raking were Step 1 in Putting Up Hay. It still had to be made available to the livestock. Lying in windrows in a field didn’t do them any good. One option for Step 2 was stacking the hay in the field.

First, the hay had to be bucked up from the windrows. The bucker was on the front of the tractor. It was similar to a scoop of a type, but it was called a hay basket. It had an open front, with sides and bottom made up of long, wooden “teeth,” like gigantic toothpicks, which were spaced 12-16 inches apart,something like 10 feet long, and ran lengthwise. That is, front to back, so that they slid over the ground easily. Jim, and later, Terry did the bucking.

A loader quite like what we used.

Older tractor and loader than ours, but the hay basket,
the part that holds the hay, is very similar

The bucker slid across the ground following the windrows of hay. My brothers tried to fill the bucker evenly, side to side and front to back, to create a solid foundation for the stack. Some bucker piles were placed in a compact group on the ground - the first layer of the stack. I think about six bucker piles were required to make the foundation. Subsequent piles were placed next to the foundation, where they were handy for Dad to stack.

Bucker pile after bucker pile was placed on top of the foundation, as the stack was built up in height. When well done, the stack was a rectangle, about 20 feet long x12 feet wide. It might be up to 20 ft tall at first. It shrunk over time, as the weight of the hay made it settle. Dad was very skilled at stacking hay. His stacks were well-shaped and almost never fell apart.

Usually putting up hay occurred twice a year, and the stacks remained in the field until late fall. That was to give the stack more time to settle and become more solid, better able to hold it’s shape. Sometimes stacks had to be taken out after snow had fallen, if it happened early.

A machine brought the stack out of the field and up to the barnyard, where it was available to feed livestock throughout the winter. The machine was called a stack mover.

It began with a farm truck chassis. Farm trucks then were about the size of a big delivery truck in the city. The chassis is the cab and engine, the frame, which is the big iron rails that run underneath a truck from the cab to the back end of the truck, the axles, and springs. The flatbed laid atop the frame. The bed was not solid. It was a series of steel rails spaced six inches apart, that ran front to back. There were teeth running on chains next to some of the rails, and very long, thick steel cables connected to winches behind the cab.

This stack mover truck came into the hayfield and backed up to the end of a haystack. The driver tipped the bed like a seesaw so the end of the bed was touching the ground, then backed up a little more, getting the pointed ends of the rails under the stack. Next, the operator and the farmer got the big cables and stretched them around each side of the stack, until they met in the back. One cable ended in a loop, which was connected to the hook in the end of the other one.

The driver started the winches that pulled the stack onto the mover. The driver also backed the truck up a bit as the cables pulled the stack on, and the teeth in the bed on the chains rotated like an escalator helped move the stack onto the mover too.

The loaded stack was a huge cargo. It overhung a couple of feet on either side of the truck. The small township roads from field to farm were about 1 1/2 lanes wide. If one met a loaded stack mover coming down the road, the best response was to pull off the road entirely to let the stack pass. From behind, a loaded stack mover looked like a gigantic haystack running down the road!

Unloading the stack was simply the reverse of loading. Piece of cake!

It was fun checking out haystacks in the fields of other farmers. Putting up a good stack that held together was not a simple task. It took some skill to build a tall, rectangular stack that contained several tons of hay. The better it was shaped, the better condition the hay would be in, the more nutrition would be preserved.

Some farmers were not very good at creating a stack. I saw stacks that were much smaller, and had very sloped sides, rather than vertical, where large quantities of hay had slipped down the sides and lay scattered about. Some looked like round, thatched African huts! Not many were as skilled with the stacker than my dad. He was Rodan with a tractor.

Hay Bales

In the 1960s and early 1970s, hay bales were small, rectangular things that weighed 50-70 pounds. They were about four feet long and two feet square. There were hundreds per field!

The baler was pulled by a tractor that followed the windrows around the field. Dad or my big brother did that chore. The baler picked up the hay and packed it tightly into a square tube that was part of the machine. Bit by bit, hay was pounded into that tube. When it reached the correct length, the bale was spit out the back, tied with two lengths of rough twine that went lengthwise on the bale.

Those bales were dropped at regular intervals around the field in lines that corresponded to where the windrows had been. It wasn’t necessary to leave the bales in the field for any length of time because they didn’t need to settle. They were already packed as tightly as possible.

Soon after baling it was time to bring them in to the barn. There was no Stack Mover for that chore. We were the “stack movers.”

Our farm truck was the size of a big city delivery truck. It had extensions for the sides of the open box on the back, to make them higher, as all farm trucks did. With those extension racks up, the sides were about eight feet high. The box was about 18 feet by eight feet.

To pick up the bales, Dad used the same tractor with the same loader as he did for making the haystacks. He slid the teeth of the loader over the ground, sliding the bales onto the loader, until it was full. Then he drove to the truck and dumped all those bales into the truck. I was in the truck with Kay and a brother or two,  standing tight against the side, waiting for the bales to fall.

Jill is unloading the 1956 Ford truck. Behind that is the 1969 Ford truck that carried the bales.

If we just let the bales randomly fall into the truck, it wouldn’t take long to fill. But … if we stacked them, arranged them by hand, we could increase the load by at least 2/3s.

Here is where the work began!!

We wrestled those bales into rows, like bricks in a house, covering the floor of the box. We finished a load while dad was gathering up the next one, so that we were ready for it. When one layer was finished, we began the next, rows going the opposite way for greater stability.

Load after load we built up. We didn’t stop at the top of the extensions to the sides. Since we were building our load with good stability, we could go higher. Our first layer, after getting above the sides of the truck, stuck out partway past the sides. The next layer helped hold that load in place. Each layer after that was stepped in, like a pyramid. When finished, the top layer was probably 20 feet above the ground. The drive to the farm, probably no more than five miles, was done slowly and carefully, since it was a top heavy load.

I was one of the first to complain about moving bales, but I liked many things about it.

It was Outside. I still love being Outside. It was frequently hot, sunny, and there were flies and miscellaneous other insects. The hay on the edges of the bales consisted of stem ends, which scratched and poked. We wore long sleeves and jeans to counteract that, though they were hotter.

I liked that I was strong enough to do the work. I liked that my muscles were strong and supple, picking up a 50 - 75 pound bale and lining it up correctly next to, or on top of, another bale. I liked the precise geometry necessary to build a sturdy, solid stack. I liked the joking and comradery with my siblings as we stacked. I liked the feeling of accomplishment, the immediate feedback of a job well done.

When we got the stack higher than the sides of the truck, it got a little scary to me. I was fearful of falling off the truck onto the ground below. Not one of us ever did. Dad always emphasized safety as we worked at any job on the farm. Farmwork ranks high on lists of dangerous occupations, but there was never anything more than a minor injury for us.

The hay smelled dry and clean. The bugs buzzed. There was usually a dog hanging about and I enjoyed watching him chase rabbits and gophers. I liked the sun beating down on me and the heat on my skin. I liked the way my sweat made my skin shine. I liked the freedom of it, and the simplicity of the work. It was good.

We weren’t done yet, however. The bales had to be gotten inside the barn and stacked there for the winter. One collection of farmers threw the bales from the truck into the barn. The other group stacked the bales inside the barn. At different times, I did both.

The best job was in the truck, the worst was inside the barn.

Inside the barn was in the shade. That was the only advantage. There was no air moving inside the barn, and it was probably no cooler than outside. Inside people picked up the bales from the second floor door where they had been tossed in, and carried them to the spot, not far away, where they were stacked again. There was a door, about five feet square, that opened onto the haymow (second floor of the barn), while on the outside was a 15 foot drop to the ground. The sole purpose of that door was to facilitate putting things like bales into the haymow.

The bottom layer in the haymow was constructed, laying the foundation for the stack, and creating the foot print for the size of the stack. Subsequent layers were stacked in a different direction, so that they were across the previous layer. As with in the truck, stability was very important.

That was the easy part. With each added layer, the work got harder. Bales had to be carried up higher to get to the next layer. We left steps in some places by the way the bales were placed, so that we had a way to get up to higher layers.

The air in the barn was still. Sun shone in the open doorway, and dust stirred up by all the movement along with bits of hay from the bales floated in the air. Flies buzzed lazily. Sweat, not being cooled by a breeze, dripped into eyes, off noses, chins, arms, backs. T-shirts became soaked. It was brutal! But it had to be done.

On the other hand, the truck was easy, in the beginning. The truck was pulled up within a foot of  the side of the barn, next to that door into the haymow. The top layer of bales was higher than the door, so the truck-unloader only had to drop them into that big door. After a few layers had been disposed of, that height advantage diminished, and much too quickly became a detriment.

Throwing the bales up into that door only got worse as the unloading progressed. By the time we got to the bottom layer, it was around ten feet up to that door. We had to undertake that after - after - stacking those 100+ bales into the truck, and after - after - unloading 100 bales into the barn.

Like I said, that was better than melting in the barn. It was Outside. There was a breeze, though somewhat stifled because we were tight against the side of the barn. There was the Outside environment - animals, insects, smells, sounds.

Sometimes there were cousins involved too. Those cousins were usually Dad’s brother Larry’s children. On those occasions there was so much laughing and teasing the work seemed to fly by. More bodies made it easier for all of us.

Similar to stacking bales into the truck, I liked the physicality of unloading bales. It had a simple and reassuring rhythm. I was proud that I could sling those bales from the bottom of the truck through the door into the barn. I liked working companionably and cooperatively with the others. We all understood that there was work that must be done on the farm, and we all did our fair share to reach a common goal. It was good.

Terry is driving the John Deere 3020 pulling John Deere 510 baler. 1982

As the years wore on, balers that made big, round bales became available. The heavy lifting was done entirely with machinery. Our baler was a John Deere, of course. Terry usually operated it, and made nice, round bales that were lined up in the feed yard.

I liked standing on a bale, rocking it side to side to see if I could get it rolling. I never did find out what would happen if a bale rolled over me. Probably a good thing.