Stacking Them Bails

When you farm, its all about getting as much hay in as you can while the weather is still nice. This past summer of 2017, we ended up bailing hay about seven times. We got around 600 square bales and about 100 round bales to add to the hay from last year.

When it comes to the bailing, we would have two tractors running; one with the bailer and another with the trailer following close behind. While my dad would bale, the bales would shoot out and land on the ground. Thats where we come in; if you are on bale stacking duty, you lucked out because you don't have to walk anywhere, you stood on the trailer and stacked. If you were on bale toss duty, you walked the 25 acer field picking up every bale and tossing it up onto the trailer to be stacked. Of course, being the only boy in our family, I got stuck with bale toss.

When it was time to unload the trailer, we had to unstack all the hay we so perfectly stacked, just to re-stack it again in the top of the barn for storage. Now that it is the winter season, the grass is not growing as fast so we need to feed the hay to the cows. Of course its up to me once again to throw all the hay down that we so perfectly previously stacked twice.

A few weeks ago, I cleaned out the an area of the barn to accommodate about 40 more bales on top of the 30 that we throw down at a time. So yesterday I threw down 70 bales and re-stacked them, once again, in the barn to feed the cows. The whole process can take an hour or more, depending on if I get any help.

It was the most gruesome hay bailing season I've been apart of. It feels like the work never ends on a farm.

This is a video of whenever we were done bailing and heading back into the barn to unload the trailer.

Here is a neat clip of the round bailer releasing the bale.