Hello Everyone! For the past couple of weeks I have been putting in square hay bales for my grandparent’s farm on my Dad’s side of the Family.

We put in around three thousand bales so far this year. We have to work around the weather becuase wet hay is no good to put in a barn. On certain days we worked in between rain drops, and let me tell you those days aren’t any fun becuase it gets hot and humid.

We usually put hay in as a family, but this past year my cousins who is in high school has had some of his buddies come and help too. This is very helpful because we are able to get more done in a shorter amount of time, and it leaves more hands to help and milk the cows.

There are a few different jobs that are required to put in hay before it even gets into the house. The first is mowing the hay, this is usually completed by my Uncle. Then my dad rakes the hay, and lastly an old family friend gets the bailer and wagons together to take out to the field and start bailing the hay.

Once he goes out into the field and starts bailing the hay we have about an hour before the first load arrives. Once it’s brought to the farm, my Dad, Uncle, Cousin, his buddies, and myself split into our own jobs– unloading the wagons and stacking the hay in the hay mound.

I work on the wagon along with our family friend, and the rest of the boys work in the hay mound stacking the hay. My job on the wagon is simpler than theirs because I am outside in the fresh air while they are up in a hay mound that is around 15 degrees hotter than it is outside!

I have to unload the hay and send it up the elevator at a pace that everyone can keep up with. The pace all depends on where in the hay mound they are stacking hay. You may be asking yourself where the title of the blog is coming from and I’m about to tell and show you…

When we bail hay, we try to touch it as little as possible, so we have a bailer with a kicker on it that kicks the bails into the wagon for us, and we don’t stack them. So, when the wagon full of bales reaches the barn they have been packed down from the trip from the field to the barn. When I unload the hay, I have to be careful not to break a bale open, because that creates more work for us.

Here is the view of a wagon when it is full of bales.

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Unloading the wagon is like a puzzle because if you pull the wrong bale out, the whole pile can fall on top of you, and that’s something we try to avoid. If there’s extra space on the wagon when the pile falls, it can make it easier to unload, but if it falls when you first open the wagon then it can pile up on the elevator and cause more problems.

Here are a couple pictures of the hay going up the elevator at the end of the load. This was the only way I could get pictures of them going up the elevator because I would get yelled at for not working. It was a joking yell, but still a yell because of the pending rainstorms.

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After the last load of the day I went and helped my dad clean and park the wagons, so I got to ride on both the tractor and the wagon. Since I wan’t getting “yelled” at to put the hay bales on the elevator I quick pulled out my phone and snapped these photographs quick.

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That’s all for this week! Stay Safe! Stay Healthy! I’ll talk to you all next week!