Putting Up Hay

I put up this year’s hay crop on the 3^rd and 4^th of July. This is a little early in the year but not unheard of. The common knowledge is to wait until after the 4^th of July to make hay because you have a better chance of getting good weather. This has been held up by science. Statistically, after the first week, July is one of our driest months. The hay is stored in order to feed the cows during the winter months, usually November through March or April when the grass isn’t growing and the ground is often covered with snow.

Our hay field is played out so I helped some friends with their hay for a reduced price on the hay I bought from them.

Making hay in this country can be very stressful. If your hay crop gets rained on, it could be ruined and you will have lost thousands of dollars. Nothing puts a hollow in the pit of your stomach like seeing a weather forecast change drastically for the worse when you have hay on the ground. Between that and the hard work, haying can be a rather unpleasant experience and most of us who still do it ask ourselves every year why we are still doing it.

When hay gets wet, if it is not dried out properly, mold and mildew start to grow on it, robbing it of its nutrients and leaving toxic residues. This is often a very difficult task. I understand that you can kill a horse with bad hay. Cows are much more tolerant of bad hay but it won’t do them any good if there are no nutrients.

Another problem with wet hay is that it can cause your barn to burn down and you end up losing not only your hay crop but your barn and whatever else you had in it. Wet hay is one of the most common causes of barns fire. Microbial action causes the hay to heat to the point that other chemical reactions occur, heating the hay to the combustion point.

So it is important to get it done right.

  

When I am doing hay, I am usually glued to weather news, drawing on multiple sources several times a day. And still it is quite often a bit of a guess and gamble. Chance of showers or thunder showers 30%? Well, maybe they won’t happen at all. Maybe they will but won’t hit you. But if they do hit you and it is only light, you will probably be okay. If they dump several inches in half an hour, you’re pretty much sunk. You usually need a window of three to four days with no rain and temperatures warm enough (I prefer high 70’s to 80’s F) to dry the hay. Depending on the equipment you have and what kind of hay you are making, you can get it done in fewer days.

It must have been really tough in the days before good weather forecasting, especially in mountainous areas like here where you often have very localized weather. This is probably reason people in those days also had other fodder crops like mangel beets, turnips and silage. Silage used to be more common for small farms. There were lots of silos around on small farms when I was kid. At some point things moved away from silage to almost all hay on small farms and lots of the old silos have gone away. Big commercial farms have always done silage I think and silage in form of haylage in big round bales that don’t need silo are coming back on many small farms.

There are several tricks to deal with hay that you think might get wet. If you think it is going to rain, don’t rake or ted your hay. Raking or tedding hay exposes more of its surface area for faster drying. It will also expose more surface area to get wet. If you leave it as it was cut, it will form a thatch, similar to a roof. This won’t protect your hay from a heavy rain but it will get you through a fairly decent shower. This is less effective if the mower has a conditioner which semi-rakes the hay as it is cut. You still need to ted and/or rake the hay afterward to get it completely dry.

Another trick is to stack the hay loosely in the barn. This allows air space for drying and heat dissipation. I also spread rock salt on the hay. I always put a little salt on the hay as a precaution but you don’t want to overdo it. One year I put on a little too much and the salt drew enough moisture from the air to cause the hay to mildew. If your hay is already baled but still in the field, you can lay it flat side up (as opposed to edge up), and it can take a little rain. If your hay is baled and it gets really wet it is worthless. It would require more effort that it would be worth to break all of the bales apart to dry them again.

We are not fully automated so we rely on hand labor to get the hay into the barn. This can be the worst part of the whole operation, ranging from mildly unpleasant to brutal.

The worst experience I ever had was in the year 2000. The person who was supposed to bale for us showed up really late in the day and the other people who supposed to help put the bales in didn’t materialize.

So it was my mom, my dad and me who put in something like 450 bales at 50 pounds apiece (that is about 11 tons) until midnight or one o’clock in the morning. To make it worse, my dad still hadn’t completely healed from heart surgery 10 months before and there was a thunderstorm threatening. I remember my forearms being so overworked that they were spontaneously cramping. Every time a picked up a bale and bucked it into the pickup or into the barn, I would have to power through a cluster of cramps. I can’t imagine how my dad felt with the stitches in his chest not fully healed.

All this was done in the dark by flashlight with lightning flashes and thunder rumbling just on the other side of Helen’s Buttes, goading us on by threatening to roll over the ridge onto us.

We got it all in the barn without a drop of rain on it. I remember hearing the rain start to fall just after my head hit the pillow that night. The feeling I had was an indescribably good feeling of mixed relief, satisfaction and dead tiredness. I wouldn’t do it again.

My dad died two months later. I don’t think it was related to that night we put in the hay. He didn’t get to feed out a single bale he had worked so hard to put in.  

The next year was almost as bad. This was the first year I had done the hay all by myself and I was so anxious and wound up that I didn’t eat or drink much for three days. By the time it was time to put the hay in the barn, I had a pretty good case of heat exhaustion going. When I finally drank something, it was too much and I ended up sitting out part of several rounds of bucking bales because I was violently ill and vomiting. I finally recovered enough to help with most of the job.

This year wasn’t too bad. We had lots of help bucking bales. It seems like every generation you hear people complain about how lazy kids are nowadays. This has not been my experience. For years now I have seen teenagers doing some hard, unpleasant work in hayfields and barns without complaint. Several kids who have helped me over the years had bad hay fever and they still plugged away with bloodshot eyes and running noses. These kids have followed admirably the unwritten law when it comes to hard, unpleasant work anywhere: You need to carry your load.

My dad and some of his friends hayed almost all summer several summers when they were in high school. I’m sure the older generations of that day complained about the kids too.

I also helped some neighbors put in a little hay. These folks have helped me greatly in the past when my equipment has broken down. 

Mowing hay.

Newly mowed (or mown) hay. The mower that cut this has a conditioner that puts the hay in rows and fluffs it up as it is cut. In the background to the left is Cow Heaven, to the right is Newby's Knob.

Same field next day after tedding. The tedder is an implement that spreads the hay out to allow for faster, better drying. 

Raking, the next step in the process. The hay rake gathers the tedded hay into large rows called windrows for baling.  I just recently took this photo so it was not in the original post. It is from a field near where the previous and following photos were taken. 

Same field on the fourth day. The tedded hay has been raked into windrows and is now being baled. 

Turkey vultures in the hayfield. A number of animals like snakes and voles that have been taking cover in the tall grass get killed in the process of haying. Turkey vultures, crows, ravens and Stellar's jays take advantage of this for an easy meal. Turkey vultures have returned a number of years to the field I usually hay. Most animals native to the Pacific Northwest prefer forests to fields so the animals one finds in hayfields are usually limited to just a few species. 

Dead vole in the hayfield. We have several species of vole in the Pacific Northwest. I did not have a chance to identify  which species this one is. You rarely see voles in pasture that is grazed because the livestock keep the grass so low that the voles have no cover from predators, especially raptors. 

Picking up hay from the field. This was my neighbor's field that I helped with a little bit. 

Backing trailer loaded with hay into the barn. 

Unloading and stacking hay in the barn. 

Picking up our hay. Often snake carcasses wind up in a bale of hay making for an unpleasant surprise when a dead snake flops into your face as you throw or buck a bale of hay onto a stack. 

This hay has to make a road trip of 6 miles so it has to be stacked solidly. A good way to do this is to alternate the direction the bales are lying in each row. A single bale spanning the two bales on each top row is used to tie the load together. A rope is run over the tie bale and cinched down for the road trip. 

A good example of hay dust. This is dust from the ground as well as grass seed, small bits of seed heads and grass flower parts, stems and leaves (chaff).  

Unloading and stacking hay in our barn. The stack in the barn is a lot like on the truck and trailer.  By alternating the direction of the bales in each row, you build a solid stack that won't fall over on you when you go in to get bales to feed. Stacking hay in the barn or mow (pronounce maow) is the most miserable part of the whole operation. Hay dust and chaff fill the air causing a lot of coughing, choking and sneezing. It is also stifling. The hot sun is beating on the barn and the hay bales, recently in the field, hold the heat of the sun and radiate it back at you. There is almost no air circulation and by the time each load is in the barn everyone is streaming with sweat. If you have been throwing a lot of bales over your head, your neck and chest are usually covered with chaff which, though it is extremely itchy, you don't want to scratch. Scratching at chaff will quickly break the skin which then stings unmercifully in your sweat and itches even worse. 

There are a lot of labor saving tractor attachments or implements if you have the money. This one is an attachment that picks up and stacks eight bales at a time in a big block.

This is a hay elevator used to pick the bales up into the loft of another barn. 

A cutter inside the baler cuts the grass as it is rammed into the bale chute. This leaves thousands and thousands of sharp cut grass stems hardened by drying on the sides of each bale. These sides are usually bumped with the thigh when they are bucked.  

Different philosophies of protection. I prefer a long sleeved shirt, closed as tightly to my chin. This helps protect the forearms and helps keep the chaff out of my neck and chest but it is also quite a bit hotter. Other people wear t-shirts or even tank tops as was shown in the previous photos. I think most folks would abandon the shorter sleeves if they were haying for weeks on end like my dad and some of his friends did when they were in high school. 

Close up of my forearm. I ended up with all these little scratches despite my buttoned long sleeves. When you really get to sweating, these little scratches sting quite a bit. I ended up driving a lot this year or the scratches would have been worse. 

My pants after two days bucking bales. These pants were not new when I started but they were in pretty decent shape with no holes. The hole on my right leg is from hitting bale edges as I boosted them with my thigh to get them up on the stack. I have a pair of double legged pants but forgot to wear them this year. You won't wear a hole in a brand new pair of pants after only a couple of days of haying but you will shorten their life by probably six months.

My gloves. Again not new when I started. The first layer of these double layered gloves was about worn through. After two days haying, these gloves were done for.