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Hay crop done
susie
Member Posts: 7,597 ✭✭✭✭
Only got 29 bales this year. The gentleman that does all the work and reaps the reward used a new herbicide this year. The fields were getting overrun with what we call milkweed. This may have lessened the bulk of the bales.
Comments
Looks dry, getting any rain?
Will you get a second cutting, Susie, or is it a one and done?
@Butchdog2 it's been drier than a popcorn fart around here. Haven't seen any rain since the first part of June. The ground has 1/2 inch or bigger cracks in it.
@NeoBlackdog not sure. If we don't get any rain there won't be anything to even attempt to cut. We get 50% chances for rain occasionally but it's mostly pop up storms from the heat and humidity. So far all the 50% has hit away from us. Ponds are getting low. Not as dry as I've seen it when I was a kid, thank the Lord. Got dry enough one year that Daddy was able to use the scoop on the old Ferguson and dig out the small pond.
No rain = poor hay crop.
Person I know who lives near mid NC says corn crop may be a bust, no rain.
I haven't started haying yet. Finally finished (or rather said "enough") planting soybeans on some ground that's been inundated by an ever growing beaver dam. We have the mower and baler hooked up but work commitments have prevented actually starting. There was a LOT of hay baled in north MO last week. I was out on a crop progress check yesterday for the first time since June 8 and was surprised by the haying progress.
Things have certainly changed since the late 60's when baling 700--800 small round bales(15-20 tons) was a bragging day. We stopped doing that almost 50 years ago. I upgraded my large round baler last year (this one's only 20 years old vs the previous one which was 40) and can easily bale 10-12 tons PER HOUR in climate controlled comfort no less.
Balers with a cab or a tractor pulled baler where you can sit in the cab of the tractor are a God send for those of us with hay fever!
O am in eastern coastal plain area of NC. Wayne county. Southern end of county,my area has had some hit and miss rains. Black land Corn doing ok ,dry land corn uis suffering. Depending on where in the county you go , some farmers are going to get two cuttings on their hay .
I always dreaded hay cutting time when I was growing up.Nobody had seen a round baler,only hundreds or thousands of small bales to be loaded on an old flat bed and trailer and stacked in the barns.Hard work that absolutely had to get done.
Three high and cap. Daddy baled hay all over the county, square bales, with copperheads in them sometimes, sometimes frogs that we thought were copperheads....lol. Grass bits blowing around and sticking everywhere. Dusty and hot. Bologna and cheese or ham and cheese sandwiches with cold orange sodas. Oh, the memories. We put up thousands of bales of hay every year. I touched just about everyone of them. I rode the wagon and stacked. The hired hands walked the fields and bucked the bales. Riding the elevator to the loft of the barn. Hay hooks to drag the bales when I was little. Hard work for sure.
I hope I did the right thing yesterday. Weather guesser said 3-4 days of hot & dry so I took the mower to the field. After reaching the field and getting started, I realized I'd owned that mower 4 years but had not run it in the field. Since it's hooked to an open station tractor Son had been running it so I could be more comfortable in the cab tractor pulling the 'big' hay conditioner. I did take a couple of breaks but still knocked down 15-20 acres in 3 smaller fields which is a full afternoon with the baler since the steepness of the hills won't allow kicking the bales out just anywhere.
The first time I baled the hay on this farm was 1967 and I'm still using 2 of the tractors I used that year(one is older than me). Nostalgic, frugal, or just stubborn but when something works there's no need to change.
I have such memories, working on a dairy farm in Idaho, bucking bales. My buddy and I had a pop up loader. We put 1,000 bales in the barn in one day. We loaded hay for about 12 weeks. Those alfalfa bales weighed 95 pounds. Don't know why they make 'em so heavy up there.
the smell of fresh hay brings back memories, mostly the taste of sulfur water, my uncle had a well that had a sulfur taste/smell. He would freeze milk jugs half full the night before, then fill them up in the morning and head out to the hayfield, it was nasty water, but so was putting up hay with a pitchfork, on to the truck/trailer then once we got to the barn, up to the hayloft, with every throw at least a 1/3 to a 1/4 would fall back down on you, you got so hot and sweaty you would forget how bad the water tasted and just drink it.............
Closest to death from over working in baled hay for sure.
Dad and the neighbor went all over two local counties and cut and baled on the "shares".
Neighbor cut and raked and dad baled it. Sometimes they got money, sometimes hay.The stories I could tell.