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?”