fresh picked
Farm Life in the Summer R E F L E C T I O N S O N B A L I N G H AY , M O D E R N A G R I C U LT U R E A N D F A M I LY F A R M S By Amy Nelson
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Photos by Joseph L. Murphy
I
love summer in Iowa – the long days and warm nights, watching fireflies in the yard and listening to the animals once the sun has finally set.
Amy Nelson is a fifth-generation farmer who grows soybeans and corn and raises cattle. She is an active member of CommonGround Iowa, the Scott County Farm Bureau Board and the Iowa Soybean Association. She lives near Davenport with her husband Randy and children Jakob and Courtney.
Many of my summer days are spent on an older tractor going round and round the hay fields to get the forage baled and put away to feed the cattle after the pastures dry up and through the following winter. This is hot, dirty work. But I love the time it gives me to reflect on farming and how much it has changed. Making hay hasn’t changed all that much since I was little. We still must cut the hay, rake, bale and put it away. Now, we do primarily large round bales instead of the smaller square ones because our feeding system has changed, and the larger ones better fit our system. I can do round bales with a tractor vs. moving each one by hand. There is still a definite place for the small square bales put on
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the rack – one by one and then put up in the barns – one by one. We use them for individual cows, those in a special nursing pen or sometimes the doors in winter are all just frozen shut in the big barns, but the cows still need feed. Many farm kids remember baling hay as a way to make money in the summer. My dad told stories of making 1,000 bales each day and putting them in the barn. He would do this day after day, all summer for other neighbors while he was in high school. This year, my son and a couple of his friends have learned these skills and will carry on these memories of helping me refill the barns. They are senior football players, so I’ve coined this work their pre-season conditioning. Making the rounds to prepare this cutting of hay (there are usually four per summer assuming we get good timely rains) gives me time to think about how farming has
