Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Baling hay, and shoveling grain?

Interesting to hear guys' stories. My dad paid us well. I remember my senior year in high school---for summer labor I got $700 a month and lived at home. Every teenage boy around wanted to work for my dad cause he paid generously. He knew he was helping kids get a start in life. I started choring on the farm at age 8 and I remember the father-son chat we had and learning I was going to get $25 a month! Pretty good for an 8-year-old feeding calves and such.

Of course, we're also talking 12-hour days, 6 days a week and feeding, milking and moving irrigation pipe in morning and late afternoon on Sunday!

I can relate to all of that. Hated picking up rocks in the fields. Now they have powered rock-pickers. Granddad taught me how to fence. He would save every used staple and nail and on rainy summer days when it was too wet to work outdoors, we would have to pound the used nails and staples straight so they could be reused. He experienced the depression and was frugal.

From what I've seen, the only ones willing to do the labor anymore are Mexicans.

Yep, I 'member pounding the staples straight too. If a wooden fence post was rotted off and needed to be replaced we saved the staples.

Pardon the pun, but you hit the nail on the head. Every farmer I knew would haves pails of used and mostly bent nails in the shop. pounding nails straight was a common job.

Baling was cruel and inhumane treatment; it just wasn't recognized as such.

When I packed hogs for Wilson's (they did cattle in the same plant), The only part of the animals that were considered worthless were the lungs. They were sent off to a local mink ranch. The guy that hauled them said that the smell there was less than pleasant.

My dad could stack 50 square bales on a F100 step side pickup.
Throwing up the top bales was a bear.
When pop wasn't farming, he was shoeing horses.
I've been bit, kicked, pawed, stepped on, rolled on, run over, pinned against a board fence, shat upon, peed on and laid in a rain storm in a corral with no shirt on with my arm up a mare's rear end to untangle a breech birth colt. Sadly, the colt didn't make it!

I've bucked hay bales, shoveled stalls, shoveled grain, cleaned storage bins, painted storage bins, wrestled tractor tires, pulled calves, grubbed roots out of a newly cleared field.
I've planted AND fertilized corn by hand. Thinned corn by hand.
Being the youngest (re: smallest) I got the down row when pulling dry corn.
Cut, split, stacked and hauled firewood.

Note:
I'm pretty sure I've left out some, but I will admit, that most of those chores weren't "days on end".....well, except planting, hoeing and fertilizing the corn!
Those lasted about a week each.

BUT.....my dad did buy into a deer lease when I was 2. Hunted with him and my grampa for over 30 years. Great times.

I haven't baled much hay, that was always Dad's job. I got to stack hay! I was happy when dad went to big rounds in my HS years.

Shovled many a bushel of grain into a grinder to feed a variety of livestock. I've shoveld a lot of barns and stalls as well. I've also done my fair share of excavation with pickaxe and shovel around the farm and ranch. I've also earned a PHD in fencing.

I'm pretty good with an E-tool as well and filled many of bags aroud Georgia, North Carolina, Louisana, California, Colorado, Germany, and Italy.

There's a lot to be learned doing any menial task, and that you're not "too good" for it.

I’ve stirred cement with a pitchfork

Mortarforker

Here is how my brothers and I got our "allowance". In addition to raising wheat/barley/durum we ran most years around 100 cow/calf pairs. Every year in late October after weaning, my brothers and I each would pick two cows for the purpose of getting their calf to sell the following year .... since I was the oldest I got to pick first ..... of course ya' pick the cow that raised the heaviest calf.

It burned like hell if your cow wasn't bred or if the calf was born dead, died of scours, or whatever. But there were lessons learned in all of it.

A lot of farmers make bales 100 to 125lb. I used to know a dairy farmer. He switched to the big bales. He said that 95% of farm workers' back injuries came from handling those heavy hay bales. Nobody can handle a big bale by hand and doing it by machine cut back injuries by 95%. He said that his workmen's comp premiums were greatly reduced.

We had a commercial greenhouse without running water. Every day we would have to go down to the pond in Lower Tonsina and dip out with five gallon buckets 600 gallons of water that we would fill in 55 gallon barrels in the back of the truck and then haul them up to the greenhouses. We would also have to pick 5 gallons of strawberries per day before we could do our other chores. Might have been a reason that my brother and I were multiple state champs in wrestling. I can't stand strawberries to this day.

We visited our cousins down in South Dakota one time when we were in high school and our uncle made sure that we bailed hay on our grandpa's farm and picked beans in 110F weather. We thought that the lifting was easy but the weather was too hot. We were used to colder weather.

Then I was underpaid. My friend and I did it for 5 cents a bale, and we had some 1000 bale days, alfalfa. I did a lot of it back in the 60s.
And I shoveled grain on the farm and worked in grain elevators many years. I’m to familiar with a #12 scoop shovel.

Yep, been there, done that. Grew up on a dairy farm and handled everything from forks and shovels to tractors and trucks. Also have had my hands on many tits..... or should I say teats.

I spent a long, hot summer loading alfalfa bales in eastern Idaho. They make 'em 95 pounds up there. My partner and I had a pop up loader. We put 1,000 bales in the barn in a day. Each bale you lift 3 times. Not work for sissies.

All this mention about baling hay back in the day reminds me of a incident on the wagon out in the field. I was grabbing the bales by the strings when they would come up the baler chute to the wagon, then stack them on the wagon. As I reached to grab a upcoming bale, there was a snake sitting on the bale. For the life of me, I can not figure out how that snake went through the baler unharmed. I knocked the snake off and it fell to the ground, and to live for another day.

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I was working the loft one day, enjoying the heat and breathing through my mouth as my nose was filled with chaff. I became aware of something pinching my ankle in quite an attention-getting manner. Noticed that the bale I had just grabbed was alive with something other than the sound of music. We had baled up a nest of those big, fuzzy, yellow and black bastards and they were taking out their umbrage on the aforementioned ankle. After that load, I went down an dunked my foot in the stock tank. Finished the day, and the next morning I couldn't stand on that foot. Actually got out of the rest of that cutting.

My neighbor was hauling soybeans for me, and I told him NOT to cross the old wooden bridge..............and of course he did. Truck broke through and spilled half the beans in the creek. I had all the shoveling I ever want out of that. I have also scooped ear corn into a crib, and baled hay.