Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire hay makin timi

Some kinda Tifton, the common native, and a bit of what we down here call Bahia grass.

Do you cut that more than once a season?

Never moved bales as a kid, but since I got into horses 42 years ago, I've probably moved a million of the small squares. Whats made here are typically called 50 pounders. Actual weight is more like 45.

All have been loaded out of the field, unloaded at home, and stacked in the hay barn, all by hand.

Now, we feed 900# round bales and move with the tractor with a spear.

I like letting the machine do the work.

We'd handel those small squares so many times, I knew them all by their first names.

Oh yes.

The baler started again at one, I'll get to haul another load or so.

I don't know why, in the "good 'ol days" in eastern Washington, they made the alfalfa bales 95 pounds, but they did.
I understand that bales in my home state of Georgia run 55 pounds. Now, if two guys, with a flat bed truck and a pop up loader can put 1,000 Georgia bales in the barn in one day, they are a pair of bad asses.
But, we were putting a thousand bales at 95 pounds each into the barn. I am 6-3 and at the end of that summer, I was 205 pounds of solid muscle, 27 years old. Nobody wanted to mess with me.

As Tennessee Ernie Ford said, of the miner who loaded "Sixteen Tons,"
"One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don't get you then the left one will..."

A guy doing that kind of labor 12 hours a day is solid muscle, and doesn't feel like taking any crap off of any one.

Two years later my brother went up there to spend a month, with my cousin. He said he needed work and I lined Brother Jeff up to load hay bales.
Jeff had played football at UGA but I knew he was going to get his ass kicked in that hay field.
After he had been up there a week I called him up to ask how it was going.
He said, "Well it was rough today, I got a little warm and had to turn the a/c down to 68 degrees. Also I was trying to get a rock oldies station out of Spokane, and the reception was poor."

It turned out, the farmer couldn't find any one to load those big bales by hand, over the winter they had gone over to round bales, all the work done by machines.
Brother was driving around my old hay field in an air conditioned tractor.

A good young man working for me stacked a thousand bales in a day years back. Joe was in demand, he did not know any better than to work.

Those days of handling bale by hand, and running a scoop shovel kept me in shape, but wore out my joints. Course, sittin' in some joints at night did not help things our either!

Football coach called it "training" and I fell for it. I've never been very bright.

As a very young lad I helped for a few days raking with an old dump rake and we pitched loose hay with pitchforks. Pulled it up into the hay mow on a rope.
Shortly after that the old guy went to a baler that did small round bales.....maybe 40-50 pounds. IIRC, that baler used the old binder twine rather than the heavier
baler twine. Twine came out of the Minnesota State Prison.

Nothing makes me sleep easier than my barn bustin' full of hay.

18* is mo betta for dealing hay(lage).

Handled a lot of idiot blocks when I was a kid on a custom baling crew, a thousand a day was a good day. Nobody had a round baker back then. And I still love the smell of fresh cut alfalfa.