There is a pattern here: I write about the last haying as the next one commences. I suppose the concentrated effort outdoors stimulates some latent academic impulse. However it may be, we are now in the midst of our fourth cutting of the year.
Four cuttings of hay is pretty remarkable, but it has been a good year, weather-wise. The drought of 2016 killed the haymaking. I have already mentioned what our fields looked like in July of that year, and when we were in Rhode Island, the drought there made it tough even to find hay for the goats.
But I am still in the middle of writing about hay equipment, particularly out-of-date equipment.
The traditional, culture-based, ways of getting farm equipment (auctions) are gone, and will only return when circumstances get dire – and that means I don’t have to talk about those things now. The modern equivalent – craigslist – is how many (even most) transactions take place in western North Carolina. I suspect the same is elsewhere, but this is where I am, and what I know. So craigslist is how I found the machines we are using to turn grass into winter fodder. I was fortunate to find a guy who was getting out of the haying business and was selling his package of equipment for, as an auctioneer would say: ‘one money.’ There were several zeroes at the end of the price, which was painful, but I have been assured since the purchase that I could have done much worse. What really matters is that we now have the various machines to do all the various things that have to be done to get hay into the barn. Those various things include cutting the hay, flipping it over after it’s cut, raking it up after it has been scattered all over the field, then baling it into a form manageable by a single human being. Oh yes, and finally picking it up out of the field and transporting it back to the barn.
It was a family affair, back in early July, going about an hour away with three trucks and a trailer to get the equipment. Sons Rob and Zach both helped and we brought almost all of it back in one trip. We broke it – and us – in haying in July. When you have equipment, it breaks. We had tractor problems and ended up getting another one to get us through the haying. By the time the third cutting came around we had repaired the equipment damaged during the second cutting and we had two workable tractors to pull the various implements. For this fourth cutting we had all three tractors working and all the pieces of hay-making equipment doing what they were supposed to do and we got through the process with almost no glitches. There are always glitches.
We are making square bales, which is a way of shaping and transporting hay that demands human labor. I have mentioned in earlier posts how human labor is something that modern farming tries to do away with, partly because farming has a bad rep as a brutal, mindless and degrading enterprise, and partly because you can’t find help anymore in the country. Farming has responded by becoming industrial, which is the antithesis of human-scaled. Round bales of hay are industrial and require industrial-sized equipment; you can’t move an 800-pound round bale by hand. Someone might object that a baler that makes square bales is just as industrial as a round baler, and I will concede the point that they are both machines, but the end result of a square baler is something that a single human being can move from place to place, which is a crucial distinction. For example, I can move the bales from the field to the barn tonight before it rains, all by myself. In January, I can sell my spare bales to smallholders and horse people who do not have 100-horsepower tractors with hay spears. There is still a place for human-scaled things in the country.