6 minute read
Hay Fever
Putting up good quality hay is part art, part science, part experience and part dumb luck
STORY & PHOTOS BY MARSHALL HUDSON
I’ve got hay fever. Or maybe haying fever. Growing up on a New Hampshire dairy farm, I’ve been involved in the annual haying ritual for longer than I can remember. Family photos show me on a tractor or in a hay wagon before I could walk.
Perhaps that explains why I get an irresistible urge to be wrestling hay bales into the barn when the summer days gain daylight length and temperatures rise from warm to sweltering. I no longer keep cows or horses, so have no need to be putting hay away for the winter, but the pull of haying fever lures me to neighboring farms needing equipment operators and manual laborers during the scurry of New Hampshire’s hay season.
The old proverb says “Make hay while the sun shines,” and today the sun is shining, so I’m piloting a Massey Ferguson tractor towing a rake, around and around the field creating a hay windrow in an ever-tightening spiral. Yesterday I drove the same pattern on a John Deere tractor pulling a tedder. Tedding fluffs the hay and turns it over, speeding up the drying process.
Craig, driving a newer Massey Ferguson, is an hour or two behind me baling my windrow into square bales and spitting them onto the ground. Gary, operating a skid-steer loader, outfitted with an accumulator, gathers the individual bales into a 10-bale “raft,” which he then lifts as a unit and neatly stacks onto a wagon.
When I finish raking, I uncouple the rake, hitch up to hay wagons and begin shuttling loaded wagons to the barn, returning with empty ones. At the barn, college kids home for the summer and looking to earn some extra money are working up a sweat unloading the wagons.
The goal of hay-making is to capture the nutrients within the grasses and preserve them in a storable form for livestock feed during the winter months. Putting up good quality hay is part art, part science, part experience and part dumb luck. There are many uncontrollable variables that work against the most important factor, timing. Farmers must juggle the plant growth and optimal nutrient content, with the availability of temporary labor, uncooperative weather, other farm chores, equipment breakdowns and the reliability of weather forecasts.
Old-time farmers used to talk of cutting their hay around the Fourth of July, when holiday help was available and the hay was “stout with some bottom to it.” Although maximum growth yields occur around this time, the nutrient value is greater earlier in the season when plants contain higher concentrations of starches, proteins and minerals.
Mowing earlier in the season also provides more potential days for re-growth, leading to a better chance of a second or even third cutting crop. Second and third cuttings are typically leafier and higher in nutrients than the first cutting, so sometimes hay producers try to get an early first crop away from the field during rainy early summer weather. This allows the higher-nutrient second-cutting legumes to get growing sooner.
Experienced hay-makers use the practices that work best for them, but that may be contrary to the technique used by the next farmer. Some farmers prefer to mow early in the morning to gain almost a full day of drying time, but others opt for the end of the day when the morning dew is burned off and the grass is drier to start with.
Some producers rely on the predictions of TV weathermen to plan their hay-making, but old-timers not trusting the forecasts like to mow immediately after a rainstorm, gambling on the likelihood of a few days of good weather as the storm clears out.
Hay-makers now have the option of using an electronic moisture test meter to confirm whether the hay is ready to bale, but experienced producers rely on the feel to determine if it is ready to be put into the barn. Ideally, hay is baled when the moisture content is between 15% and 18%. Hay stored at more than 22% is at risk for spontaneous combustion. Insufficiently cured “wet” hay has been blamed for many barns burning to the ground.
With the unpredictability of New Hampshire weather and the unreliable availability of temporary manual labor, many farmers have switched to putting up their hay in large round bales wrapped in plastic or chopping it as silage. This requires less manual labor and fewer consecutive dry sunny days, but it requires the purchase and maintenance of specialized equipment. The need for baled hay still remains for smaller farms, or for sale to horse owners, landscapers and for erosion-control barriers on construction projects.
In my youth, every bale needed to be manhandled several times before it was finally fed to the cow or horse. Picking up bales in the field and throwing them up to the designated stacker atop a semi-loaded wagon took physical strength and a practiced swing and release technique. A missed throw meant the bale would come tumbling back down and, like Sisyphus, you’d have to throw it back up again, handling it yet another time.
As the load on the wagon grew taller, and you grew more tired, re-throws became more frequent. But even this repeated bale handling was considerably easier than the haying done a generation earlier when it was cut by hand with a scythe, raked with a bull rake, and loose-loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon with a pitchfork.
Advancements in farm machinery have made hay-making less labor intensive than a generation or two ago, but it is still a tiring proposition requiring energy, commitment and endurance. As grueling as it may be, I have fond memories of hay season from my youth. For me, mid-summer happiness includes being sunburned, sweaty, itchy with hay chaff, and looking at 300 bales on a wagon to be unloaded with 300 more waiting to be picked up in the field.
This hay fever must be making me delirious.
