Late summer hay... in These titles mean nothing.
- Oct. 3, 2022, 4:28 a.m.
- |
- Public
.... raked in windrows.
… from the tractor.
… tractor and baler.
… wagon with bales - cow candy.
There were seven or eight big round bales too.
The pictures aren’t quite the way I’d take them, but still....
This is the clearing. These are this year’s only small bales. Jim likes to have a load of them to use as ‘bait’ when he wants to persuade the cows to do what he wants - to get them in to separate and move them. That’s why they are cow candy. Cows like them a lot.
When I talked to the deer hunters they agreed it is a special place. Surrounded on three sides with wild woods, covered with a sky of its own....... not flat, not steep. Its own place.
It had been solid woods but when my dad and his brother bought the farm they decided to have the top of the hill ‘grubbed’. A man with a German name came from north of here with a bulldozer and worked to make it bare with piles of trees and brush. It was too rough to plow or plant crops. It grew a lot of wild black raspberries. Twenty years later my brother hired someone to clean it out again and make it into a field. Ever since then it’s grown a year corn followed by four or five years of hay, and then repeated.
It’s a place for deer and eagles and all wild things.
Last updated October 03, 2022
ConnieK ⋅ October 03, 2022
I love this entry. The symmetry in photos and words is music to my eyes and very calming. My friend used to load reluctant cows onto a trailer by using cow bait. :)
gattaca ⋅ October 03, 2022 (edited October 03, 2022)
Edited
I’m curious how a baler actually works. Does it bale the hay up as you go over the field?
It’s all serene and beautiful.
Cow candy!
woman in the moon gattaca ⋅ October 03, 2022
Oh in the old days we would have made a movie.
Yes, the baler is pulled by the tractor and it picks up the stream of raked hay and bales it and this generation of equipment the baler throws the bales into the high sided wagon. That is how the kids and I hayed those wonderful years. Later we got a big round bales - a series oThef them actually - that picked up the hay the same way and then rolled it into big bales - each one equal to 15 or so of the small bales. The big bales aren't handled by hand, but by forks on tractors, hauled on trailers, stored outside and fed in big metal ring feeders. Their quality is more iffy - though small bales can be poor quality too. It depends on whether the hay's been rained on or not - or how good the grass and alfalfa were in the first place. We make big bales of oats with the grain still on the straw and they are good cattle feed. We also chop corn stalks after the corn is harvested and make big bales for bedding for the cattle in winter. It's important to put the manure with the corn stalks back on the land the corn stalks were taken from to get the organic matter from the stalks back into the earth. If the stalks weren't baled they would have been plowed under/into the soil.
Farming, especially farming with cattle, is this beautiful complex series of exercises through the year.
Rivercity ⋅ October 03, 2022
Lovely
noko ⋅ October 03, 2022
The recent story of the land makes the pictures richer. Thank you for that.
Jinn ⋅ October 04, 2022
I love the fragrance when they hay. I have not actually smelled it for years but I remember I loved it .
Beret ⋅ October 05, 2022
Beautiful!
NorthernSeeker ⋅ October 06, 2022
Do the crows follow the tractor around when the windrows are made?
Serin ⋅ October 12, 2022
It took me the longest time to accept the IT equivalent of "the pictures aren't the way I'd take them" as I started to run teams at work. Part of it is the certainty that "the way I'd do it" is equivalent to 'the correct way to do it." But that's just part of delegating, and you got pictures without having to take them yourself. Which is a win. Unless you hate the pictures.
woman in the moon Serin ⋅ October 12, 2022
It is a win.. having him take pictures. He does a decent job and he 'obeys' my suggestions pretty much. Of course there are times when I would have taken a picture on my own that I'm not doing now, but mainly I don't care.
I should get a phone. I'd like one with an FM radio along with a camera, but I have my telemarketers land line and I really can't see/afford having two monthly bills for almost the same thing.
Maybe next summer after fiber optics comes down our road, cell service would improve enough that we could give up the landline.