This is Iowa from my viewpoint. Across the street is a row of houses and in their backyard is this farm. You can see the grass, alfalfa hay field raked for baling, and the cornfield in the distance.
You then add one very fast moving John Deere tractor and the baler and you have a lot going on in the neighborhood. It was mowed two days ago and yesterday they raked it into windrows. Today he is driving along picking it up and making a spooled from of hay bale.
The field extends down to the edge of town and if you look closely you can see him way down there. The driver is one of my former students and he really is moving as fast as he can go to get the hay picked up into the bale.
Once the bale is full sized he has to stop the tractor and let the machine spin the bale and wrap twine around it. Then as you see here he is dumping it onto the ground.
The first cutting and baling went so fast that I missed it so this time I was right out there when he started . I was told that he got seven of these large bales off of this field the last time.
When I was a kid my dad baled his hay into little square bales and we had to pick them up, put them on a rack and take them into the barn and stack them. My one neighbor that I helped had round bales and that was fun as you got to use a hay hook, like Captain Hook, and load them onto a hay rack. It required a lot of man power to do it either way.
Today one farmer can do the entire operation, have a tractor to pick each one up at a time, then pile it at the end of the field. They then cover it with plastic sheeting.
5 comments:
I know that you have wanted to capture this process in pictures for a while now. This is very interesting to me. We have many hay fields around us, but I have never actually seen how they do all of this. Around Halloween, many farmers decorate these rounds of hay like pumpkins!
Interesting how farming especially baleing hay is simpler than it used to be..I hated making hay..picking up the bales and hoisting them on the wagon..my arms and legs would be all red and prickly..and my hands blistered through the gloves..and that old hay dust stuck to my sweaty skin..nope that is one thing I do not miss about farming:)
It is so large and so wide. The scale of it and that feeling of openness must be a strange feeling indeed.
I like this post. Interesting. I remember the first time I seen a round bale on the fields and thought, "what the heck is that??!!??" I was so used the squares. I find the process very neat!
I have watched with fascination how they make the hay by rolling it into round bales, I've only handled to square ones.
Just a vast landscape to look out onto and ponder life's mysteries.
Great post !
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