That Was Disappointing

It was a good hay season day, temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, a light breeze blowing, and all the equipment and people were working as expected.

It had been a rather long day starting around daybreak. We were able to get quite a bit done while waiting for the dew to dry off the fields starting with the basic daily cattle chores and normal prep for field work (lots of greasing gears, lubing chains and mild cursing when the grease gun shoots the thick goo all over instead of inside the vital joints of well-used machinery).

By noon, my right-hand-helper arrived and we were ready to begin picking up bales in the farm truck. It was warm working out in the bed of the truck as the bales were delivered over the side racks by the Henry loader. But, the real heat of the day was felt during the unloading of the truck.

Under the hot tin roof of the barn, standing above a 7 high stack of bales that the bale wagon had neatly stacked, we man-handled bales off the top of the truck and up the stack 5 layers more in order to fit enough hay in the barn without using up all the floor space.

One person would move a bale from the front of the truck to a person on the back of the truck. Then, that person would lift one bale at a time to the one on the top of the stack, the top person would pile the bales up the stack one layer at a time. Because of all this lifting, we only remove only the top layers that are on the truck (about 80 bales). The base of bales on the truck assist the people lifting with a 12 foot height advantage to fill the top of the barn. It takes longer with more short trips in and out of the field to do it this way, but it saves on backaches.

After our helper for the day had left, the raking and baling continued out in the fields. The rush to get more bales for the next day was on. Day turned into evening. I broke away from the fields to do the evening cow chores. After chores, I went over to check if Mike was able to finish baling the field when I saw him driving the tractor with baler to the barn.

Broken part. Dang. Almost had this field done.

Until it was too dark to work outside, the rest of the evening was spent jerry-rigging a  make-shift part that will do until the end of hay season. Currently, there are a whole lot of pieces from the baler laying about the driveway. By morning, we should be able to get the baler back into working mode and again, and once the dew dries off, will be back at the business of making hay.