The late-summer post about haymaking – written during our third cutting – mostly talked about the vagaries of weather. It is truly amazing how quickly Zach and I have gotten critical about other haymakers. Someone will cut hay the day before it rains, and let it sit wet for a couple of days, then bale it into totally excrable rounds without (apparently) a second thought. Or someone will do a good job of cutting and baling, only to leave the bales in the field for weeks. Of course, this is hay for cows, who have a well-deserved reputation for slowness. I guess if cows will eat the stuff eventually, then ok. Goats, on the other hand, have a completely unearned reputation for eating everything in sight. Most people have filed away in their memory an image of a goat contentedly munching on a tin can. Nonsense. Soon after we arrived in Leicester, Buncombe County, North Carolina, I found a craigslist posting for ‘Goat Hay.’ Turns out the guy was selling spoiled hay for mulch or feeding to goats. He clearly had the image of the tin can-eating goat firmly in mind – which goes to show that country people sometimes don’t know any more than their citified cousins. Goats are the pickiest eaters I know on a farm.
Which brings us to the other part of haying, after the weather, and that is haying equipment. I wrote previously about what haying was all about: the preservation of summer grass in a form that kept it through the winter so animals could eat it. This preservation involves three steps: harvesting, gathering, and storing. These have changed dramatically over the last 75 years or so.
Historically, harvesting grass meant mowers (men) going out with scythes and cutting the grass. After it dried, it was raked up with hand rakes (later giant, horse-drawn rakes) and stored in haystacks in the fields. Look at Monet’s Haystacks painting at the top of this post.
As in so many other areas of human endeavor, the Industrial Revolution transformed these traditional methods of accumulating grass. The sickle-bar mower was invented in the 1830s, which did away with hand mowing (at least in this country). In the 1930s the tractor-drawn hay baler appeared, though it did not come into common usage until after WWII. Louis Bromfield, in his Malabar Farm books, talks a lot about ways to cure and store hay in hay mows, and he was writing in the late 1930s and ‘40s. In the 1960s – modern times to me – the round baler was invented, which is currently the state of the art.
The main ‘advantage’ to the round baler is that it eliminates almost all human labor from the process of making hay. Of course it does this by substituting money and fossil fuel.
My helpful farmer neighbor wanted to fix me up with a round baler and a hay spear for my tractor and could not understand why I was not interested. He is a cattle farmer, and his idea of goats was the one I mentioned above: contentedly standing in some barren, dirt farmyard, chewing on a tin can. Cows willingly eat crappy hay, but goats won’t. Cows also don’t caper over stacks of round bales of hay, while goats happily play king-of-the-mountain on them, pooping and peeing all the while, then refusing to eat the fouled fodder. What I wanted was a set of distinctly old-fashioned hay-making tools. But how do you find old-fashioned equipment? In the old, agricultural, days, you went to a farm auction after the death of a farmer and had a social day of it where you bid on stuff and talked to neighbors and maybe (or maybe not) took stuff home with you. I remember this from my own childhood in southern Illinois, and later when we lived in the country in SE Michigan. There were Mennonites there, and they were devoted auction-goers and they wore plain clothes and spoke to each other in their strange brand of new-world German.
Here in Buncombe County, North Carolina there are no Mennonites that I know of, and no farm auctions either. But there is craigslist, and that is how you find hay equipment these days. The social aspect of country life, alas, has diminished significantly, which is a shame.
So soon after we arrived in the mountains I began an almost daily search for old-fashioned hay-making machines. I knew we needed something to cut the grass, and something to rake it up into rows, and I definitely knew we needed something to bale it into pre-round-bale form, and then we needed something to haul all those pre-round-bales from the field to the barn. Whoever said the farming life was simple!