dad cut hay an smely ol gramps raked some while dad fed cattle. i let ol smely tag along when i hald the fst load

dad loading some bales





darrel the man that bales the hay for dad.

Cool!!

Money in the bank, for later.

I spent a summer up north of Newport Washington loading hay bales by hand. 95 pound bales of alfalfa. My cousin and I put a thousand in the barn in a day.


Thank God for machines that load hay.

Used to stack hay in the barn from the field for folks.

25 cents a bale.

Pretty good money back then. Hard, hot work.

I did 1125 bales of sudex bales, with 3 other boys

Hand loaded, hand unloaded. Only grace was a conveyor.

Jackwad older boys pulling rank on the conveyor, loading the fugg out of it to log jam us in pigeon crap dust 110 degree barn.

Single biggest pay day for my 14 year old self; my career in slave labor. Got $60 for 12 hours work. 😃

Been there and done that, back in the 1960s. What a hot pain in the ass job that was.

Only did it once. Fast learner ( aint done it since ).
Couldnt now no matter what

Spent a lot of time on a hay truck, $.02 a bale in the mid 60's

As I said above, Dave and I put a thousand bales a day in the barn and they were 95 pound bales. This was 1977 we got 9 cents a bale. To split.
So for 12 hours of that I got 45 bucks.
But it was Cash! No deductions or taxes!

tankz ol smely aint so bad if you sta upwind gramps aint the sharpezed pin the diapir but he aint so bad juju seem to like him some

Good job Gilly, Keepin' that old timer busy will keep him out of trouble!

Did hay when I was a kid, if I ever stack another bale of hay it'll be to soon.

We got ten cents to stack in barn in 1970. We thought we were cutting a big hog in the ass. Gas was .20 a gallon. You could take a girl for a hamburger and to the show for 5 bucks or for 10.00 you could haul ass to the chicken ranch in La Grange for a sure thing. Lots of friendly girls there.


Damn. That was 50 years ago this summer. George Mitchell took good care of us boys that worked for him. He didn’t look like a Billionaire.

Ten cents a bale? What a capitalist, 7 years later we got 9 cents.

In my high school years, I was paid $20.00 for loading a semi truck and trailer. I would spend my summer vacation days, evenings in the spring and fall running a Harobed. Here is an ultimate trivia question, how did the word Harobed originate? In eastern Washington, we have seen the appearance of what I call the industrial hay growers. Most of alfalfa hay and Timothy they put up is exported. One of the larger operations puts up 27,000 acres each cutting. We normally see 5 to 6 cuttings of alfalfa per year and at least two cuttings of Timothy.

25 cents?!!!!!!!

1960-1966 Dad got 5 cents for twine or 8 cents for wire. 3 penny bonus when we took our own tractor to pull the trailer.

I was just a little tyke, driving the tractor. But I guarantee 50 bucks was a hell of a day for Dad. Never was a hayin' crew. Just Dad on the trailer and packing bales up the stack, and little old me trying to steer the tractor well enough that Dad could hook the bales while standing on the trailer.

My 14 y o granddaughter out working today with her dad.

Heavy hay Bob, what is it?

still watering here........

1st cut 2-3 weeks out

Coastal. I’ll find out what kind

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.