Wrapping Round Bales

“Hey,” Dale addressed his second son. “You need to finish your coffee. Dick Pero is going to be here any minute and you need to be dressed and ready to help if necessary.”

 

“Okie dokie,” Scott replied. “I’ll be done in a second.”

Scott threw back his head and drank the remaining liquid in his orange flower pot mug. (Scott was sort of the family gardener, so someone had bought him a mug shaped and colored like a clay flower pot. In all fairness, he wasn’t a very dedicated gardener. He didn’t mind planting or harvesting, but he rarely weeded. ) He set his mug on the counter by the sink and made a beeline for the basement door. He pulled his barn boots off the shelf and slipped into them before heading out the back porch door. He swung his leg over the seat of his fifteen-speed bike and pushed off down the sidewalk. Scott rode his bicycle down the manure pit drive and the creek bridge. (The manure pit drive was the driveway that went across the damn that acted as the southern barrier of the farms square manure pit.) He pedaled hard to get over the rough terrain of the waterway to where his father and older brother were moving round bales in preparation for Mr. Pero’s arrival.

Dale was in the skid-steer staging bales as Caleb drove the John Deere 530 back and forth collecting the few round bales that had been left in the field overnight. The 530 had a front-end loader that had been retrofitted with a bale spear. The bale spear had been attached to the bucket attachment of the loader. There was a second bale spear attached to the three-point hitch on the back of the tractor.  Caleb would spear a bale through the center with the front spear and then back into a bale with the back spear. This ensured a more balanced load for the trip back to the staging area.  

From their position, just south of Grandpa Henning’s pasture, Dale, Caleb, and Scott could see Dick drive his pickup truck down the long driveway to the farm. Having received prior instructions from Dale, he turned right onto the manure pit drive and slowly guided his rig to where the Henning crew was waiting. Trailing behind the pickup truck was a rig unlike any that Scott had ever seen before. He hadn’t been sure of what to expect and definitely didn’t expect what he saw before him. Mr. Pero was at the family farm to wrap round bales.

 Occasionally, weather conditions were such that it was difficult to get hay baled when it was dry enough for traditional dry baling. So, the hay was baled wet and would be wrapped in white plastic to preserve the hay in a manner that was similar to chapping hay and storing it in a silo. The nutritional value of the hay was preserved this way without having to deal with the mold that normally came with wet hay.

Scott had helped his dad and brother wrap a couple of round bales the year before but they had wrapped those bales by hand. Scott and Caleb had rolled the bale as their father had instructed while Dale held a two-foot-long roll of white plastic bale wrap and walked around the bale, wrapping as he walked. It was a fairly labor-intensive process but the results of their efforts had been positive enough for Dale to make plans to wrap more bales the following year. 

Dick Pero’s bale wrapper was a sight to behold for a boy who had never seen such a thing before. It consisted of a tilted platform and a large ring that stood perpendicular to the platform. The ring had two rolls of bale wrap mounted to its inside surface. There were a couple different types of bale wrappers available at the time. Some wrappers mounted to the three-point hitch of a large tractor and wrapped every bale individually leaving the field speckled with what looked like a bunch of oversized marshmallows. Mr. Pero’s bale wrapper wrapped the bales into a long tube that ended up looking like gigantic albino worm.

By the time Scott got done gawking at the machine before him, Dick had already unhooked it from his truck and got it set up. Using the front loader of the 530, Dale placed a round bale on the intake side of the platform. Dick tucked the ends of the two wrap rolls under the netting of the hay bale and fired up the machine. The ring containing the wrap rolls began rotating slowly around the bale. Rollers in the platform moved the bale through the ring until the green of the bale had been completely covered in the bright white wrap. 

The intake platform was big enough to hold the next bale in line before the first bale was wrapped. The next bale butted up against the first. The wrapping continued until the two bales looked like one extra-long bale. By the time the second bale got wrapped, the first bale had reached the end of the discharge ramp.

“Do we need to pick that up with the skid steer or something?” Scott inquired of his older brother.

“I’m not sure,” Caleb responded. “I suppose if they need us to do something, they’ll tell us.” 

Neither of the teenagers wanted to look silly by asking a silly question so they stood back and watched, hoping that the adults knew what they were doing. As it happened, the adults did know what they were doing. As the first bale made contact with the ground, the wheels of the wrapper began to turn. The whole rig moved across the ground leaving the first bale on the ground behind it. The boys were thrilled to see the wrapper in action. They stood by and watched as Dale loaded the bales on the platform, the ring spun around and around wrapping the bales, and the wrapper moved across the field leaving a line of bales behind it.

Finally, every bale was wrapped in the line. Dick hooked the wrapping rig back up to his pickup truck and bid the Hennings farewell. Dale stood with his sons on either side of him and surveyed the fruits of their labor.

“Well,” he addressed his sons. “What’d you think of that?”

“That was pretty cool,” Caleb responded with a smile.

“Yeah,” Scott agreed. “It sure beats wrapping those suckers by hand, huh?”

Making Hay

Scott watched with a smile as the forty-twenty John Deere drove alongside a windrow of dry alfalfa. He looked behind him at the John Deere square baler and the wooden hay wagon that trailed behind it. (The wagon had been built by Scott’s Uncle Jonathan while he was in college.) It was a bright sunny summer day. The sky was spotted poofy white clouds that stood out against a vibrant blue backdrop. Birds dove back and forth around the tractor, sometimes coming dangerously close to the driver of the tractor. 

“What’s with those birds, Dad?” Scott inquired of his father.

“They’re grabbing lunch,” Dale responded with a smile. “All the activity with the tractor and the hay stirs up bugs. You see how they get really close to the ground?” Scott nodded. “They’re grabbing bugs when they do that.”

“Wow, that’s pretty cool,” Scott nodded.

The process that brought the Henning crew to this point had taken a couple days. Making hay is a multi-step process. Two days earlier, Dale had fired up his New Holland self-propelled haybine. The haybine looked a little bit like a tractor that you drove backwards. The cab sat over two large tires. The engine compartment was behind the cab and sat over a pair of smaller wheels that swiveled when the combine turned. A large cutting head was attached in front of the cab. The cutting head had a large reel that pushed the hay into a sickle bar. The sickle bar consisted of a series of triangle blades that moved back and forth across a stationary bar. Once the hay was cut by the sickle bar, it shot through a pair of rollers that crushed the hay so that it dried faster. 

After the hay was cut, it was tedded. A tedder was a piece of machinery that had two rotating disks that rotated horizontally. Each disk had five arms attached to it and each arm had a pair of prongs attached to the end. The disks would rotate and the prongs would spread the hay out so that it would dry more quickly. It was really important that the hay was dry before it was baled. Damp hay molded in the mow and could get hot enough to create a fire hazard.

Once the hay was dry, it was raked into a windrow with yet another piece of equipment. The hay rake the Hennings used was ground-driven. It had two disks that were connected by five bars. Each bar had several prongs not unlike the prongs on the tedder. The disks were perpendicular to the ground allowed the bars to be parallel to the ground. When the rake started moving, the disks would rotate. The bars would sweep close to the ground, gathering all the hey into a neat windrow that was easy to bale. Needless to say, the haymaking process was very involved and required a certain amount of cooperation on the part of the weather.

Now, after all that work, it was time to bale. The baler gobbled up the windrows of hay like a hungry monster. The hay passed into the body of the baler and emerged at the other end as a three-foot square bale. The bale emerged jerkily from the baler until it was pushed to the end of a steel plate by the bale behind it. Once it reached the end of the plate, it was pressed up against a lever which activated the kicker. The kicker threw the bale from the baler into the hay wagon behind. The bale soared threw the air and bounced on the wooden floor of the wagon until it came to rest against the back wall. Scott loved this part. He tried to time it just right so that he could look around at everything else and still look back just in time to watch the bale take it’s flight from the baler into the wagon. He timed it pretty good when they were in a row, but often lost his count when they turned at the end of the field.

Scott’s uncle Jonathan met the baling rig at the end of the field and waved to Dale to stop for a moment. Dale obliged and throttled back the engine and cut the power take-off. The baler slowed to a stop and the noise dropped low enough that Scott could almost hear the bird chirping. 

“Hey,” Jonathan greeted the baling duo. “This is the last wagon. The others are already full. You gonna get it all on here?”

“I’m not sure,” Dale responded. “It’s going to be close. I might need you to do some stacking.”

“Not a problem,” Jonathan responded as he turned on his heel and climbed aboard the hay wagon.

Dale re-engaged the power take-off and increased the throttle to operating speed. He guided the baling rig into the next row. The baler commenced with it’s gobbling. A bale sprang from the kicker and flew towards the wagon. Jonathan snatched it out of the air and slammed it into place on the front of the wagon. Scott’s jaw dropped in amazement at his uncle’s abilities. Another bale flew towards the wagon and was snatched from the air and put in it’s place. One bale after another was pulled from flight by Jonathan’s skilled hands and stacked across the front of the wagon. Every few bales, Jonathan took a break and allowed the bales to glide past him into the haphazard mound towards the back of the wagon.

The wagon got closer and closer to it’s full capacity as the baler cleared row after row of hay. Jonathan stacked the bales at the front of the wagon higher and higher and occasionally tossed a bale back onto the pile behind him. The stack in the front finally got high enough that the bales barely cleared them. At that point, every bale had to be stacked or tossed. Just when Scott thought they couldn’t possibly get one more bale onto the wagon, the RPM’s dropped back and the power take-off disengaged. They just made it.

Jonathan climbed off the wagon and pulled a pin where the baler tongue attached to the baler itself. Dale reversed the rig and turned the wheel of the tractor until the tongue moved from one side of the machine to the other. Jonathan replace the pin and climbed up on the back of the tractor. (The tongue is the bar that attaches to the hitch of the tractor. On the square baler, the tongue could be adjusted so that the baler would follow the tractor in two different ways. In one position, the baler followed the tractor so that it was offset to one side. That way the tractor didn’t have to run over the hay. In the other position, the baler followed directly behind the tractor which made it easier to transport from the field to the barn.)

Dale guided the rig across the creek bridge, between the manure pit and the lower pasture, and up the barn hill. Jonathan jumped off the tractor and ran to the back of the baler where he pulled the hitch pin that connected the wagon to the baler. As Dale drove away, he backed one of the twins up to the wagon. (The twins were a pair of Cockshutt 40 tractors that the Hennings owned. The pair had narrow front ends and had consecutive serial numbers.) By the time he got close enough to the wagon, Caleb was already waiting to hook the tractor up. Jonathan backed the wagon into the barn with the others and pulled the bailing twine that was attached to the hitch pin. The tongue of the wagon bounced off the wooden barn floor as the tractor pulled away. 

Scott and Dale met Caleb and Jonathan at the top of the grassy hill and walked towards the house.

“Well,” Dale declared. “We didn’t do too shabby today. We stacked the loads from yesterday and baled the rest of the field.”

“How many more cuttings do you think you’ll get this year?” Jonathan inquired of his older brother.

“Well,” Dale replied thoughtfully, “This is third-cutting. We’ll get one more for sure. Maybe two, if I can find the time. We’ve got a lot of silage to put up to, so there’s that.”

Jonathan nodded in response. The baling crew walked into the house and helped themselves to cold glasses of water. The boys stood in the kitchen as the men changed boots from their lace-up work boots to rubber muck boots. Caleb and Scott didn’t need to change boots because they wore their barn boots pretty much everywhere. Once everyone was properly booted, they walked right back out the door they had entered through and made their way to the barn for the evening chores.

“A farmer’s work is never done,” Dale sighed as he walked across the yard.

 

Sweet Corn

The sun shined bright in the mid morning sky as the Henning crew made their way through the sweetcorn patch. The stalks, still wet from the morning dew, rustled and shook in response to the movements of the multi-generational picking team. Richard, Clyde and Dale each carried a burlap feed sack through the straight rows as Caleb, Scott, and Kelsey walked alongside picking ears of corn as they went. Not every ear got picked as many of them weren't ready yet. In a year that had ample rainfall throughout the summer, a sweetcorn patch required two or three pickings before the end of the summer. Each picker would feel each ear before picking to see if the ear was big enough to pick. The younger pickers, unsure of their abilities, often pealed back a couple inches of the husk to get a glimpse of the corn underneath to determine the readiness of a particular ear. If the ear was ready, it would be plucked from the stalk and tossed into the nearest bag. If it wasn't, it would be left behind for the next picking. As each bag was filled to capacity, it was carried to the bed of Mean Green which was parked at the edge of the field. Mean Green was Dale's pick-up truck. It was a green long-bed F-250 with an extended cab. 

The sweet corn patch stood at the edge of one of the farm's corn fields. In the spring, Dale had chosen a spot that he thought would serve the sweetcorn well and had used the corn planter to plant a sizeable patch of sweetcorn. There was a little cross-pollination on the row nearest to the field corn that left some of the kernels a little tough, but the general result of Dales efforts were quite positive. The sweetcorn benefited from the fertilizer that had been applied to the field and always produced well. Despite the size of the sweetcorn patch, it took the picking crew less than an hour to finish their task. Once they were done, the children and their grandfather piled into the back of the truck as Dale and his Uncle Clyde climbed into the cab.

Dale drove the truck to the milkhouse stoop where he backed the truck up to the cement pad. The crew unloaded the corn and duped the bags into a huge pile on the concrete and began the husking process. The experienced huskers were able to split the silky tuffs at the tip of the ear and peal the husks and the silk away from the white and yellow kernels and snap the stem off the end of the ear without leaving a single strand of silk on the corn. The less experienced huskers, which were pretty much limited to the youngest generation, spent most of their time picking individual strands of silk off the ear until it was finally clean enough to toss into the “husked” bag. Finally, after just over an hour, all the corn was husked. The husks were tossed over the gate into the barnyard for the dairy cows to enjoy and the ears were loaded back into the truck and hauled up to the house.

The truck was parked beside the fire pit that was a couple hundred feet away from the back porch door of the white farmhouse. Richard set up a metal tripod over the fire pit and directed his grand kids to start hauling water to fill up the oversized pot that he was about to hang from the tripod. He set to work building a fire as the children filled the cauldron with water. Before long, a fire blazed around the cast iron pot and the water inside began to steam and eventually, boil. 

Clyde began filling several wire egg baskets with ears of corn as Dale set up a shiny galvanized waste barrel beside the house. He filled the barrel with cold water from the spigot and returned to the fire pit to check on the progress there. Dale picked up a six foot long pole with a hook on the end. He looped the hook underneath the handle of on of the egg baskets and dipped the basket and it's contents into the boiling water. He glanced at his watch and turned to his second son.

“Okay, Scott,” he explained. “In ten minutes I'm going to pull these ears out of the water and carry them over to that silver barrel. Your job is to keep the ears under water until they're cool enough to cut the corn off. You'll have to keep water running into the barrel to keep it cool enough. Also, you'll probably be soaked, but I don't suppose you'll mind.”

“Nope,” Scott responded with a smile. “I don't think I'll mind one bit.”

Dale dipped the hook into the pot and pulled the basket out. He placed it on the ground and dipped a second one into the water. He glanced at his watch before grabbing the handle of the hot basket with his gloved right hand. He carried it over to the barrel of water and dumped the hot corn into the cold water. Scott, who was questioning in his head why the saying was more fun than a barrel of monkeys and not more fun than a barrel of water, plunged his hands into the water. He pushed the ears down into the cold water and waited for them to bob back to the surface when he pushed them right back down again. After a minute or two, the ears of corn stopped bobbing back to the surface. Scott reached to the bottom of the barrel and pulled a couple of ears out and held them in his hands, testing them for heat. They were quite cool, so he pulled all the ears out of the water and placed them in a bucket just in time to receive the next batch of hot ears.

Once the ears were cool, they were carried into the kitchen of the farmhouse where the cutting crew were waiting to get to work. There, gathered around the kitchen table, were a half dozen people of various ages holding a number of different cutting utensils. Richard was sharpening a well-used knife with a steel as Caleb placed a wooden corn cutter across a medium metal bowel. (A corn cutter was a wooden trough that had a contoured knife and a un-sharpened flange attached to it. The knife would cut the kernel caps off and the steel flange would scrape the juicy corn off the cob. The removed kernels would fall through a slot in the corn cutter into the bowl.)

The corn was delivered to the kitchen table and everyone sprang into action. Two people were using corn cutters and everyone else used knives. They cut the kernels off the cobs and then scraped the remainder of the corn off the cob before tossing the cob into a nearby bucket. At their bowls and cutting boards filled up, each worked would empty their respective receptacles into large bowels. The corn was spooned from those bowls into labeled freezer bags and various tupperware containers. The corn was then stacked into boxes and crates and set aside to be divided up between the laborers later.

This process was repeated over and over throughout the day. The corn was blanched over the fire. Cooled in the galvanized can. Carried into the house where it was cut from the cob. The corn was bagged to be frozen and the cobs were carried to the barnyard to go the way of the husks. The entire process was an all day job with the exception of a short break for lunch which consisted of hot dogs, hamburgers, and of course, corn on the cob. Finally, just in time for chores, the last ear of corn was carved, cleaned, and discarded. Each participating family went home with an appropriate share of the fruits of the day's labor.

“Well,” Dale sighed with satisfaction. “I guess that'll hold us over for a bit.”