Insult To Injury

This has to go into the ‘fer cryin’ out loud’ file.

First though, I have to go back to do a little explaining. The bales are picked up out of the hay field by two different methods.

One is the bale wagon or Stackliner that in theory will pick up and stack 70 bales at a time with one person driving the tractor. Our Stackliner is held together with spit and baling twine so the person driving the tractor has to get on and off to move bales and make adjustments several times during a loading to keep the bales from breaking or stacking correctly. We also use another person to be the spotter or ground support while loading to watch all the angles the driver can’t see from the tractor.  It definitely takes two people to unload it because if every detail is not watched closely, the stack will fall over.

The other way to pick up bales is with The Big Red Beast, our farm truck, and using an elevator that scoots along the ground to pick the bales up so I can stack the bed of the truck and up above the racks.

Both are hot, dirty jobs and neither one is easy but the Stackliner does take the burden off of picking up and stacking each and every bale. However, the Stackliner only stacks the bales 7 high in the barn and we need to be at a minimum of  11 high just to get all the bales into the 3 barns. That is where the Beast comes in, we hand stack high above the bed of the truck and back the load up to the 7 high stacks in the barn. One by one we interlock bales above what is already there until we can’t lift bales anymore. For each load the bale wagon stacks we load bales on top from the top of the truck. During this stage of barn filling, the original truck full of hay (the ones inside the racks) are used as the base and we only refill and unload the top so we have a 10 foot height advantage to stack above the bale wagon blocks.

Ok, now with all that background you are ready to hear the story…

It was a tough week with a couple of days 100ish temps and a wild thunder storm cell that passed directly over head. I was patting myself on the back for pulling through relatively unscathed when a load that was already stacked in the barn by the bale wagon fell over. This was just before we got the truck pulled in to firm the stack with bales tied into the other above the bales placed by the Stackliner.

This is the point where I yelled ‘fer cryin’ out loud’ or something similar to that before dragging all the bales out of the way and re-stacking them back up into their designated spot.