Haying Season – Video

This video covers our haying season step by step.

When each field is ready, Daniel cuts it using a discbine. It is offset from the tractor, so you don’t run over the field as you cut it. Fields may be grass, alfalfa, oats, sordan, or like the first one shown here, triticale. Daniel is an artist with that discbine, cutting precisely next to buildings, power poles, and fence lines.

Once the forage has been cut, it needs to dry… Baling hay too wet may actually make it heat up as it composts, actually setting fire to itself. Drying is dependent on heaviness of the crop, rain, dew, wind, and sun. ”Making hay while the sun shines,” is a true statement. If hay dries out too much, it won’t pack into bales and one way to fight that is to bale at night when there’s more moisture in the air or first thing in the morning with dew on it. To help it dry or to reduce passes by the tractor on the field, sometimes the windrows, the line of hay kicked out by the discbine, are raked together, turning two windrows into one large one, and exposes the wetter bottom so it can dry. Raking it can also knock off the leaves so the options must be weighed.

Vernon and Brandon switch back and forth in the baler. In this video, Brandon is baling, with Vernon at work moving the bales to the stackyard.

We try to get the bales to the stackyard ASAP. That lets us get water back on the field fast to regrow another round, plus, like leaving a box setting on your grass, the bales can kill the crop underneath. There’s a trick to building haystacks… they must be solid and packed tight to prevent rain and snow from ruining the hay.

One thing I didn’t film was the little Bobcat loader, piling the bales into stacks of two, ready to load on the hay trailer. Quinlan and I have both worked on that in the past couple of days. He is so much better at it than I am…

Anyway, enjoy the video!

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