Haying season is beginning
Can’t take farm out of boy
When I was growing up on the farm years ago, I spent many of our summer days in the hay field. Haying, (or putting up hay, or hauling hay, as we spoke of the project), is very essential to a cattle or dairying operation. Surviving the winter season on such a farm depends on the supply of hay that has been accumulated during the summer season. There’s basically no way to survive in dairy farming or in beef cattle farming without hay for wintertime cattle feeding.
Even during the days when I was on the farm and bringing in the hay crops, we began seeing changes in how the operation was done.
In the 1940s, when I was becoming old enough to take part in the farm work, we were still putting up hay in the ways it had been done since the late 1800s. We were still farming with horses. Our barns were built using a design for storing loose hay. Even our own new barn, built in 1943, was basically a roof over a huge haystack, with pens and stalls around the sides for calves, horses, milking cows, and maternity pens where many of the cows had their calves. The new barn did begin some mechanization which saved us labor. Dad installed a hay fork at the inside peak which was a rail on which a trolly ran, carrying a load of hay back into the barn and dumping it in place as part of the “stack.” Without that hay fork we would have been carrying pitchfork fulls of hay back into the barn by hand. That would have been some back-breaking work in the intense heat of summer.
Also, rather than mowing the hay with scythes swung by the backs and shoulders and arms of the workers, we had mechanical mowers pulled by horses. But there were no motors on them, the cutter bar was powered by the wheels which gripped the ground and transferred the power to the gears and pitman which moved the sickle bar back and forth over the guards. We also had a horse-drawn dump rake, which raked the hay together into piles (with a little help from the farmer’s pitchfork).
That dump rake was the first hay operation that I was able to start doing. That I did as my legs grew long enough to reach the dump pedal and as I learned to handle our team of horses. Old Mike and Pat were pretty cooperative as I learned to handle the reins and watch the gathering hay underneath me for the time to dump. When I pushed the dump pedal, the mechanism engaged to wheels and the rake tines, lifting the tines and dumping the hay. I would later have to learn how to hurry the drop of the tines back into raking position, but with the rake pulled by horses the pace was slow and normally the tines would just fall back down quickly enough. I even remember some times when the horses and tractor were busy and we pulled the dump rake with the car. That made you by necessity get sharper and quicker on the pedals and levers.
My Dad never seemed to want to buy a hay baler. But we did hire a custom baler to do some of our hay in the 1950s. The custom baler was another farmer, Mal Rogers. The Mal Rogers farm was located on the south side of today’s Hazelton Road, an area that I think has been owned by Plantation Properties and is now planted as a tree farm. Mal had a Case wiretie baler, pulled by a small John Deere tractor. The baler power came from a Wisconsin air-cooled motor mounted on the front of the baler. The baler required three men to operate — one to drive the tractor, one to put in the blocks separating bales and feeding in the wires, and a third to actually tie the wires on the back side of the bales.
That was dirty and dusty and demanding work, to operate that old baler. Actually it was a step forward in saving labor, but the bales still had to be manhandled multiple times, picking them up, hauling to storage, and stacking them in place, plus the lifting and hauling required to feeding them to the cows.
Today, haying has come to be more of an operation from the tractor seat. Farmers for the most part have retired the trusty old pitchforks. The mowing, raking, baling, transporting and storing of today’s large cylindrical hay bales have mostly been mechanized. Advancements in tractor technology, especially in the area of hydraulic implements, have largely transformed the haying operations. Nevertheless, haying is still work for the farmer, involving long hours on the tractor, handling the hay crop, and maintaining the equipment.
There just isn’t a lot of “take it easy” time for farmers. I haven’t spent my life as a farmer, but as they say, you can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.
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