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.