Making hay - part 1

During my childhood, back in the 1970s on Balla Machree, our farm was a very active place in the summertime. Our herd of 50 Holstein Friesian dairy cows required an enormous amount of hay to be stored for wintertime feed, and making hay was a non-stop summertime endeavor. Unfortunately, there were never enough helping hands to get all the dry bales picked up from the fields and securely stored in the hay barns before ominous dark thunder clouds invariably dumped buckets of rain on top of three days’ worth of back-breaking effort. At the time, our farm didn’t have the hay bale kicker accessory that conveniently launches bales exiting the baling machine up and into the connected hay wagon. Instead, the tractor and baling machine swallowed up the rows of raked hay and dispensed the finished 40 lb. rectangles one after another. A truck or tractor towing our open-sided, flatbed wagon followed behind the baler. The hay heavers, farmhands or friends and family, walked alongside tossing bales up to the stacker, a job allocated only to our strongest farm-hand employee since bales were being tossed at him from both sides of the wagon. Moving back and forth with the agility of a speed skater, he would catch and fling, lining up the bales in a geometric pattern, so when the rows were upwards of 10 high, they defied gravity by not toppling as the wagon lumbered over endless bumps and dips in the terrain. Since I was never able to heave a bale higher than the first row on the wagon, my job was usually limited to bunching up bales from the rows into piles for more efficient loading.

Once the wagon was full, any kids in the field climbed to the top of the stack for the joy ride back to the barn. Just thinking about the parental negligence is spine tingling. Not only were we putting all trust in the stacker that somehow this 15-foot-high pile of hay bales wouldn’t tip and dump all the children to their immediate deaths, we were also targets to any low branches from the canopy alongside the drive back to the barn. Once the tractor and trailer got to the main road, the driver, usually our farm manager Paul Roy, slipped the tractor into its road cruising gear, and all of us kids would crouch low in our duck and cover positions taking in the thrill of the diesel-tinged breeze blowing in our faces.

Friends and family on haying day. I’m the tomboy on the top far right. Farm manager Paul, the most tolerant and kind man I’ve ever known is standing on the right wearing his signature porkpie cap.

Look at that watch! Next to me is big brother Josh and three cousins wishing they were swimming in the pond.

Some years later, likely coinciding with diminishing accessibility to free labor (I became considerably more interested in horses and a lot less interested in farming), the kicker implement was introduced to the lineup and helping hands were only summoned for unloading the wagons in the barn.

By 1985, Balla Machree was no longer an active dairy farm, all the cows were sold, and hay making was downgraded to something that happened only if family members were around to pitch in. Some summers, only a few of the hayfields would even get one round of mowing. The PH in the soils, no longer blasted with nitrogen from an endless supply of cow manure, suffered. Lush green grasses and legumes became overrun with invasive weeds, unpalatable buttercups and milkweed. Nonetheless, thirty-three years later, Matt and I were committed to resurrecting farming on Balla Machree, and we needed to step up and take charge of the hay making for exclusive purpose of feeding our growing herd.

In the past, always relegated to hay bale tossing, I was never one to maneuver the tractor and equipment. To be honest, it scared the shit out of me. I had witnessed our ancient Case tractor spew boiling hot hydraulic fuel. I had cleaned up blood-soaked dish towels left by my father as he was whisked away to the emergency room with a gaping head wound. On that occasion, he had attempted to self-extract a stuck bale from the kicker mechanism on the baler which subsequently reengaged the kicker thereby flinging the bale like a projectile directly at my father who then went flying head backward into the attached kicker wagon. I recalled my brother as a teenager, while driving the 1010 John Deere pulling a hay wagon on a steep hillside, accidentally slip the gear into neutral sending the tractor and wagon into a runaway. Panicking, he launched himself from the driver’s seat landing in a heap with a broken collar bone. As a 50-something mother of three, I was not keen to experience any of these things! I would have much preferred to play the delicate damsel card and yield all heavy machinery use to someone else. Nonetheless, if I was going to carry on with this farming gig, I wasn’t going to escape learning how to drive the tractor for much longer.

As I mentioned earlier, most of the active farming on Balla Machree wrapped up in 1985. All the haying equipment, while still somewhat functioning, was rust pocked, missing necessary bits and bobs, and sat upon tires with cracks in the sidewall and worn smooth treads. The “big” tractor was the Case in which I witnessed the volcanic explosion of hydraulic fluid following an episode of log splitting that somehow wiggled free the gummed-up hose connections. Side note, the log splitting had been a family affair with our young son Miles at the helm of the forward and reverse lever on the splitter. Fortunately, there was enough distance between the tractor with the spewing oil and the spot where our son was standing. He escaped the episode unscathed. To be fair, the hose issue was to be blamed on the old splitter, not the old tractor. Nonetheless, there were significant issues with the Case. The brakes were reliably unreliable, and you had to periodically maneuver the lift controller for the front mounted bucket since it tended to slowly slip downward - a real game stopper if it made it all the way down while you were in forward motion. There was nothing you could do about the cloud of diesel fumes that came with every breath of air, and you had to wear long pants or risk burning the inside of your calves if you happened to graze the hot engine block between your feet. Unfortunately, the process of making hay, from mowing to baling, requires a minimum of 2.5 consecutive days of sunny weather. Of course, these perfect days rarely fall over a weekend when I had people around to be helpful. I had to face my fear and climb aboard the saddle of this wily beast otherwise the hay wouldn’t get cut, risking drastic shortages of feed for the upcoming winter.

In summer 2018, with Matt still spending most days working in Amsterdam, I needed to source an instructor who would forgive me for my mechanical shortcomings and yield to my instinctive apprehensions. My father, who lived down the road from us, was certainly out of the question since he has no ability to manage nervous energy. Tensions between us escalate rapidly resulting in everyone screaming at each other. When we get to that point, I start spewing F-bombs and ultimately wind up feeling very guilty that I have created such torment for an 80-something man. My best option was my cousin Randy who lived up the road and had a job that afforded him some extra time during the weekdays in the summer. AJ, at that time, also lived on site and got home from work around 4:00. I made sure that my first task would commence later in the day in hopes that he would periodically peak out his window to make sure that I was still safely sitting in the tractor’s driver’s seat while driving in circles around the pasture dragging the mowing machine behind.

Despite having driven a stick shift car since I was 15, the gears on the old Case were similar, yet not at all. There were two gear shifts; one had gear A, B and C which allows you to choose how low or high you want the engine to run. “A” would make sense if you were dragging a dead cow in reverse up an icy steep incline (Daffodil), and C would be for free riding on the road. B would be my range for pulling a piece of haying equipment in a dry pasture. Then I had to select 1, 2 or 3. “1” was for steeper spots, but mostly I would stay in gear “2”. “B-3” would be for free riding down the road with the equipment still attached to the back. Of course, all transitions of A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 required engaging the clutch which was also on its last legs. Nothing happened unless I firmly pushed the clutch in all the way, as far as it would go. Since I’m only 5’3”, I had to slide to the front of the seat in order to make my leg long enough to reach the end of the peddle. Full disclosure, there was some grinding, but under cousin Randy’s guidance, I got the hang of it.

With the tractor driving lesson complete, I was prepared to embark on the first step in the process of haymaking, mowing. Randy took care of connecting the mower to the tractor which included running a pin through the hole of both the mower yoke and the tractor hitch (attachment bar) as well as the more arduous process of connecting the PTO shaft. Up until that moment, I only had knowledge of PTO meaning Parent Teacher Organization – something I participated in a very peripheral way when my kids were in elementary school. I baked the cookies for the meetings, dropped them off and hit the road before all the type A moms took their seats. Now I know another definition for PTO, Power Take-Off. Yikes! There is yet another lever on the tractor that operates the Power Take-Off, and Randy was very emphatic that any time I stopped the tractor, first thing to do is power down the PTO. My first mowing task was the relatively flat, modest sized field, otherwise known as the ball field since it has been the site of many July 4th family softball games, across the road from the Balla Machree main barn and Meg and AJ’s rental house. I never found a comfortable groove, but mowed the field without incident, nonetheless. Task #1 complete, AJ, home from work, helped me disconnect the mower and reconnect the next tool, the tedder. As I mentioned, all our somewhat functioning equipment was in rough shape. The tedder was the roughest.

The verb “to ted” essentially means turning over and spreading out cut grass for purposes of drying the grass that ultimately becomes the hay. The tedder is the machine that does the tedding. Like the mower, it is attached to the hitch of the tractor. There is also a PTO connection that powers the tines that are attached to multiple paired up circular spinning rotors that turn the mowed rows into swirls of freshly cut grass. Once a field is “tedded,” all the grass is uniformly laid across the expanse of the field for the sun and breeze to dry it out. When one fires up the PTO to a tedder that is in good working order, the steady whirring rotors spin in perfect harmony. Each tine miraculously moves in perfect harmony with the others, never touching another tine rotating simultaneously. Unfortunately, in our case, the rhythmic clang, clang, clang with every rotation of the rotors let everyone know for miles in either direction that our tedder was seriously out of whack. However, the grass was already cut and without the tedding process, it would never dry, and we wouldn’t be able to harvest any hay.

Despite the reality that our tedder machine desperately needed some professional TLC, it wasn’t beyond the point when a little farmer ingenuity (not mine) and a few whacks with a crowbar couldn’t get me up and running. AJ was able to subdue the clang, clang of the mismatched timing of the tines to a much more reasonable clink, clink. Good enough! Task #2 underway.

The next morning, AJ ran the tedder around the field again. Then, after one full day and two half days of drying on either end, we were ready to complete the hay making process. First, the dried grass spread out by the tedder needed to be raked into rows. The baler would then drive over the rows and scoop up the hay that was then somehow tied with set of two strands of twine, then spit it out the back of the machine. On other haying occasions, we would connect an additional attachment to the baler called the kicker. Instead of a completely assembled hay bale being plunked out the back of the baler, the bale lands on the kicker base where it is blasted like a cannonball up into the air to fall back down with a thud into the wagon that is additionally attached to the back of the baler. Since this was my beginner field, the kicker was scrapped from the lineup.

Despite gaining a morsel of confidence by successfully navigating both the mowing and tedding duties, I was steadfast in my resistance to operate the baler. Having participated in haying efforts on the farm since I was a child, I was acutely aware that the most sensitive piece of equipment, certain to break down at some point during the haying process, was the baler. Invariably, when everything seemed to be chugging along smoothly, a hay bale would pop out the back like an oversized mushroom, indicating something amiss with the tying mechanism. Everything would then grind to a halt, and whoever was driving the tractor would have to jump down, lift a metal trap door on the side of the baler, tinker with something inside, shut the trap door, hop back on the tractor, and carry on with the baler working (hopefully) perfectly again. There was no way that was ever going to be me! As a mother of three with a few dogs and cats in our collection, I was a tiny bit hopeful that I would gain some intuitive insights into farm animal care. However, I was 100% certain that when it came to machinery, I was once and forever a total nincompoop.

AJ took care of the baling, and I was tasked with raking. Unlike the other pieces of machinery, the rake does not require a PTO to run. It operates a bit like a push lawn mower, but powered by a puller, not a pusher. Fortunately, our John Deere Gator worked as a perfect pulling complement to the rake. I was able to luxuriously sit slightly askew under the canopy of the Gator, one hand on the steering wheel and the other stretched across the seat so I could peer over my shoulder from time to time to make sure the raking tines were rolling up the loose dry hay into neat and tidy wind rows. The one major downside to not having a PTO, however, is that there is no mechanism to lift the rake off the ground when you reach the end of the field and want to change direction. When the Gator is moving, the rake is raking. The entire end of the row would end up in a massive, tangled bundle, ultimately creating a very difficult maneuver for the tractor and baler. In other words, AJ would have to drive into the wooded area at the end of the field if he was to follow my rows. Of course, I couldn’t reverse the Gator since that only meant the rake would then push my bundle in the opposite direction. I was in a serious pickle. Humbled by my inexperience, I simply hopped off the Gator and lifted my curled hay braid and spread it out by hand throughout the row. At least AJ could now drive to the end of the row before turning up the next.

Since the field wasn’t very big, and AJ was very adept at running the baler, even with my wonky windrows, the field quickly had the appearance of being swept clean then pocked with hay bales scattered hither and dither. At last, our final task was loading the bales into two pick-up trucks, then unloading and stacking into the haymow on the upper side of the big barn. Once the last bale was tossed off the truck and the evening sun was fading across the hillside, I remember feeling a tremendous sense of accomplishment tinged with a slight drumbeat of dread reminding me that we had only just begun.