Making Hay

Making hay is a process that I didn't know anything about. It turns out that it takes multiple days, multiple steps and it's really hard work. Paul taught Pramod how to drive the tractor (because Pramod was really interested and I was not), so Pramod did a lot of the steps that I didn't.

Paul's hay fields actually belong to someone else. One of the field's owners just appreciates having their field plowed annually. I'm not sure about the other field owner.

First, cutting the field. Paul has a tractor as well as a bunch of attachments that fit on the back of it. One of these attachments is a grass cutter. Just like mowing the lawn, only the lawn is really tall.

Afterthe grass has been cut, it needs to dry. This will take somewhere within 2 days if it's warm and sunny. The next step is to wait, and rake it over to help the different areas dry faster. When we first made hay, Paul told us we were going to "rake" it and I thought we had to manually rake the entire field. I was thinking that it was going to be a long, hot day. However, there is another attachment for the plow that has wheels with needles coming off so that it rakes all the hay in it's path into a pile on one side -- upside down

from the previous pile.

Once the hay is all dried up, we need to make bales of it so that it's easier to transport. This is done by another attachment. This one was really cool. It had a thing with tines that spun to pick the hay up off the ground. Once in the compartment, there was a spiral that spun to move all the hay from the long compartment down to the end where the rectangle bale was formed. Once enough hay was in the end compartment, there was a giant knife that would

cut off the ends so that it formed a perfect rectangle. Then the rectangular bale was tied and dropped out the back. This was all done by the machine, someone just needs to drive the tractor over the rows of hay.

We weren't making the big round bales, but they were still really heavy. I was not a lot of help when it came to picking them up. I was able to roll the bales closer to the tractor so that those who could pick them up didn't have to walk so far or waste their energy walking them all over the place. We all were very tired and sweaty

afterwards.

Lastly, we needed to move all that hay into the barn before it got rained on (it's been raining a lot here). That was also a lot of work, maybe even more work than getting them off the ground. But we did it and we felt pretty good when it was all done!