USDA Announcement
Farmers who planted cover
crops on prevented plant acres will be permitted to hay, graze, or chop those
fields earlier than November this year. The USDA adjusted the 2019 final haying and grazing date from November 1 to September 1 to help farmers who were
prevented from planting because of flooding and excess rainfall this spring.
Balers Gone Techno
While this farmer built an
operational hay baler able to do the work of three square balers, this hay bale
wrapping machine takes it all a step further. It appears to be a “cross between a carnival ride and a futuristic time machine." Nowadays, most hay is baled up with round balers—and this review explains why that trend has been prevalent.
However, some still want the small, rectangle bales, and the throw-back essay
below explains what that once entailed.
Fifty-pound Bales, Wild
Drivers, and Drunken Sailors
Every summer, a rural intoxication returns to our part of
the Midwest. When farmers cut the first crop of hay, I drive to my folks’
farm, roll down the windows, and let the aroma from a neighbor’s field seep in
with the dust from the gravel road. If the hay is lush and fresh—and if a warm
humid breeze carries the scent of alfalfa, orchard grass, and a few remnants of
clover—you can feel the memories activate, and you can catch visions of an era
gone by.
Nowadays, the few farmers who bale hay in our area use high
tech equipment and generally produce huge round bales. Some decades ago, the
ritual was more complicated. Everyone used machines that produced square,
fifty-pound bales that we could stack and transport to the barn. We boys would
grab the bales as they came out of the chute and then stack them on the rack in
hopes that the load would hold together. If the bales tumbled off on the trip
to the barn, you deserved all the ridicule you were sure to get at lunch time.
As we got older, we could hire on with baling crews, and if
you joined up with old Clarence, you were in for a wild ride. He wore bib
overalls and a tan safari hat while driving the tractor that pulled his
customized baler equipped with a powerful “Wisconsin engine.” As my cousin
Tim said, “He could bale trees with that machine.” Clarence would put it in
gear, seldom look back, and rarely slow down. If the field was bumpy, we were
like drunken sailors on the rack, and the only thing that held us down was
grabbing the bales. They were extra heavy because Clarence used wire instead of
twine, and we occasionally had to team up to hoist a bale to the top row of the
stack.
Speed was fine with us since Clarence paid by the bale—a
whopping penny a bale—so if the machinery didn’t break down and rain didn’t set
in, you could make twelve dollars or so in an afternoon. That bought a lot of
gas for a ’56 Chevy back in 1967.
Those images are gone, as most hay fields now have
seven-foot-tall round bales casting shadows in the evening sun. But new-cut hay
still has the aroma, and anyone who rode a rack will remember the heat, the
lifting, the hypnotic sound of the baler—and the satisfaction of a job well
done on the last ride in at sunset.
by dan gogerty (top pic from locusthill.jpg, and bottom pic from livingthecountrylife.jpg)
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