Hands-on with haymaking

Faced with a need for hay and a paddock too steep for machinery to cut it, the couple came up with a way of making bales by hand.

Aaron designed and built a manual hay baler which presses the hay into cute half-sized bales.

He uses a weed whacker to mow the grass. They turn it each day with rakes to dry.

“The first time I was doing it, a neighbour asked me, ‘are you all right?’ He thought I was out mowing the whole paddock,” he laughs.

They pile the dry hay in a shed, then bit by bit, it’s processed into bales. It works similarly to an old-fashioned wool press. Loose hay is squashed into the oblong timber box. It’s compressed with a wooden lid attached to a hefty lever made of 4x2 wood, until the box is full and they can tie the strings.

It takes about 20 pressings to make one bale, which are about half the size of a conventional bale and light enough to lift in one hand.

However, they can’t produce enough hay to keep their horses fed over winter, so they also barter vegetables or homemade laundry powder with locals in exchange for standard small hay bales.