Hay season started early! We were all so excited with the amount of rain we had in the early spring, the hay grew fast and tall. We started cutting in early June and got the first bit of hay picked up. Our goal is normally to get first cutting off before Fourth of July, up here in Northern Michigan, and it was looking like we were going to be done by mid June. It was looking like a good summer hay season and we were excited, might we possible get a third cutting this year? Then it started raining and hasn't stopped raining long enough for anyone to do any more hay since. So we work on other projects around the farm, with a close eye on the weather forecast and wait. All this waiting and watching has given me time to think about how much the process of doing hay has changed in the life of the old barn. If those boards could talk, what would they say about our way of doing hay in 2024?
If those boards on the old barn could talk would they say, "wow your great grandpa, uncle Tuffy and uncle Bill would be so impressed?" Or would the say we have gotten soft from the days those three men worked this field? You see when these three men ran the farm up until the late1990's they did all the field work the old fashioned way, with 50 year old tractors and equipment and a lot of it was by pure hard work and manual labor. I remember when I married Dean in 1996 going out to help with hay a couple times. These gentleman enlisted every young person in the family they could convince to come help, and Dean, his brother and some cousins would show up without fail when called. I being newly married wanted to spend every minute I could with my husband so I went to work as well. I remember helping put hay in the old leaning barn we all have come to love so much. They used the loft area to store hay and it was filled every year all the way through the 90's.
Uncle Tuffy drove the John Deere 60 tractor to cut the hay they used a old simple John Deere hay bind. Great Grandpa Hansen used a John Deere rollabar hay rake to rake the hay up, Great Grandpa did this job until he was 96 years old! When the hay was dry and ready to bale, Uncle Bill drove a John Deere 70 tractor with a John Deere baler (are you seeing a trend, there is a lot of green and yellow on this farm) hooked behind it, the baler dropped the bales in the field. Then Great Grandpa would pull the hay wagons around the field, and this is where the young people of the family came to work. At some point they did invest in making the work a bit easier by purchasing a hay loader that picked the bale up off the ground and dropped them on the wagon. The crew of cousins would neatly stack 150 bales onto the wagon in six rows high. When the wagon was full it was drove to the barn and all unstacked only to be stacked again neatly into the barn.
Hay is a fussy commodity and must be done at just the right time, when it is just the right humidity, to make a good feed. If you bale and stack it too early in the barn and it has to high of humidity it can ferment in the hay stack and it will catch on fire and burn your whole barn down. If it is to dry all the leaves will fall off and you lose the nutritional value in it. If it gets rained on a lot it will be ruined it as the hay gets musty and moldy. This is why we were in a holding pattern this year with the constant rain in the forecast several days coming up. The hotter and dryer the day is while doing hay the better! Doing all the manual labor these 3 men and the crew of cousins did on the hottest days of summer was exhausting, but it kept the old guys of the family moving and gave them something to look forward to. The crew of cousins could have skipped out to go to the lake with all their friends but they showed up to help with hay for their great grandpa and uncles.
Fast forward a few years and great grandpa died at 101 years old in 1996. the father son trio of farmers was now 2 brothers and they were in their late 70's, after a few more years they made the hard decision to rent out the land and step back from the field work. Until 2018 when we purchased the property from Uncle Tuffy's estate, and Dean was ready to get back in the hay field like in his youthful days.
We tried to used Great Grandpa's tractors and style of equipment for hay season. Aunt Barb, Uncle Bill's wife, watched us from the farm house porch across the street doing hay with the old tractors and loved every minute of it. However, the year of 2018 was a bumper crop of hay! We got a lot of rain, it felt a lot like this year, a lot of rain and not enough time between the showers to get hay off. It wasn't long before it was clear in our modern way of thinking that this is crazy choosing to do it the hard way and Dean went shopping for more modern equipment.
He purchased a new John Deere tractor, a Kubota disk bind that made cutting the hay so much easier! He purchased a used New Holland round baler to quickly get the hay picked up when the rain is coming in (we don't care what color it is as long as it does the job well). He purchased a rotary rake that rakes two rows into one really quickly making fewer trips around the field for the baler. We now have bale baskets that the baler drops the bales into and then we dump out onto the barn floor. We still have to do the manual labor of loading every bale onto the elevator which takes it to the mow and then someone stacks it neatly in the barn. My job is generally loading the elevator in the barn. We modernized to make getting the hay cut down and picked up as affective as possible, if it would just stop raining.
But now another new idea is being thrown around. As we watch it rain and rain this summer, which is great for your garden and yard and all the crops except hay, a new way of picking up hay has been discussed. The idea of renting a wrapper that wraps the round bales of hay air tight while it is still at a high moisture rate which makes it when stored and later cut open perfect cattle feed. This modern piece of equipment, the hay wrapper, would make the job of making hay with all this rain, easier and quicker and the hay useable with the highest possible nutrient value for our livestock possible. However, high moisture hay does not work for our customers who feed horses, it is cattle feed and we have a lot of horse customers who need hay. But right now, the forecast looks like we have a window of clear weather this week, so we will work on getting as much hay in as possible this week baled up for our horse customers, while keeping the high moisture wrapper idea in the back of our minds.
Dean keeps updating the equipment as hay money allows, the hay must pay for all this equipment he buys to make the job easier and easier. So would those old boards on the barn say, wow we have gotten soft or would they say the old father son trio of farmers would be impressed? I hope they would be impressed with the updated way of making hay on the days the sun shines and the days it doesn't, even if it isn't all green and yellow equipment.
It is amazing the things this old barn has witnessed, if those boards could talk and tell us all the history of the crops on this field around it. The progress of making our work easier and more productive and making crops that would have been useless in the past useable now, is really quiet impressive.
Which brings me around to my ponderings and writing, how can I use this information in everyday life, farming or not. We all have days when it feels like the sun is shining and life is perfect for making hay! Those are the days it's easy to get to work and get the things life has for us done. But what about the days that are cloudy, cold, and yucky feeling. What about the days when it just down poured on your hay that was almost ready to bale? Are you able to find a way to still get the hay in the barn and used for your spiritual mental emotional and even physical nutritional value? How do we cope with the "prewashed hay" in life.
As far as I can see there is not any new equipment to make these days easier in our everyday non-farm life. The hard days will come, the rain on your almost perfect ready to bale hay will come. Whenever the Bible talks about hard times in life it always says when they come, not if they come. It is inevitable we will all face hard times and rain that seems to never stop in this life. The question is what do you do with them. The old equipment that has been used for hundreds and thousands of years is still the equipment that works best. There is no new high tech invention that will be anywhere as effective as the old piece of equipment that has always worked perfectly at the task of helping get the spiritual/mental/emotional "hay" off in the rainy days of life. The best piece of equipment anyone can have to get through the rainy seasons of life is the Bible.
So please if you are going through a hard time, and in todays world I think we all are going through hard times everyday, pick up the old time tested and best piece of equipment you can find to help you get the crops in the barn, even in todays crazy world, and read it for yourself. Pray for God to show you specifically what you need to get through your day and start reading. I want to tell you all my favorite passages to read in a time of trouble, but those are for me and God, and maybe He has somewhere else for you to read. So please stop and pray and open that old paper Bible you have tucked away on your shelf somewhere or open a Bible app and see what God has for you today. It truly is the best way to get the new "hay crop into the barn" in your spiritual, emotional, mental and even physical life.
Please let me know what is your favorite passage to read? If you don't have a favorite passage because this is the first time you read your Bible, tell me, where did God take you in the Bible? I would love to hear about what you read and how it affects your rainy day to come. So drop a comment and let me know where you go in the oldest piece of equipment called the Bible to make your rainy days better.
And please pray for a couple weeks of no rain so we can get the hay in the barn. Thank you
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