Shades of putting small bales in the barn!

I was in the shed working on bee equipment right after dinner. I have a thermometer on both ends of the shed. Both said 105° today. Glad the roof is white tin and not galvanized. Just like 1959 all over again. Wish I had a dollar for every one of those we put in or took out of barns in the late 1950's to 1970 when Uncle Sam called me away from the farm.

Those were the days my friend we thought would never end! But they did. Glad I don't have to do that today.

I can drive the tractor, my work horse. I can cut some wood, fix on my vehicles etc., but lift up three bales onto the trailer, we'll probably here the sirens coming.

In high school I worked for 4 different farmers baling. Was all ways on the wagon stacking. One farmer had four wagons so the last four loads went in the shed and were unloaded the next morning while the dew burnt off. Made some good money tossing bales. Now my back wont take it.

Baled a lot of hay as a youth, then the notice of Great Uncle busted a bale for dairy cows opened a Bald Face hornets nest. He passed away a few years later after all the cows were gone as well as no one wanted to follow that road.

Tbone95 wrote: So....the bales went off the ramp deflector....and....just stayed there in a HEAP???? Oh my, never would that be allowed. Spent a lot of days in the hay mow, hayloft, whatever. Made football practice EASY. Of course then the coach was still mad at you because you must not be trying hard enough. I still spend some time up there. Not sure if it’s making me old or keeping me young. Only about 10-20% of the square bales we used to make.

john(MI) wrote: Tbone95 wrote: So....the bales went off the ramp deflector....and....just stayed there in a HEAP???? Oh my, never would that be allowed. Spent a lot of days in the hay mow, hayloft, whatever. Made football practice EASY. Of course then the coach was still mad at you because you must not be trying hard enough. I still spend some time up there. Not sure if it’s making me old or keeping me young. Only about 10-20% of the square bales we used to make. It was a huge barn and they fed beef so it wasn't as fancy as a dairy farm.  There were probably bales under there 20 years old.  His wife unloaded the wagons, and she was a frail looking little lady.

Pffft! That's all I've ever been around is beef cattle. And a few horses. Barn is 60 feet wide x 80 feet long by 29 feet tall. I don't know if that qualifies as huge or not? It's bigger than a lot of 'em around here, but I've seen others WAY bigger.

Sounds to me like you worked for a guy who didn't give a crap! 20 year old hay? Please, that's terrible.

Mo, getting the dang dew off around here is/was always the issue. On a very ideal day, my sister, or perhaps dad, would eat an early lunch, and rake at maybe 11:00 or 11:30. Or start raking at 11, and somebody would come switch out real quick so the other could eat lunch.

Could start baling at maybe....12:30 -1:00. Man, you could really do the work with a lot of people. Somebody would keep raking, somebody driving the baler, a guy stacking on the wagon, 1 shuttling and unloading, and 2 in the mow. We would average about 200 bales per hour COMPLETE, that is, from the field to a neat pile in the barn, and we'd go 5-6 hours for 1000-1100 in a day. On very productive days, sometimes we'd run out of down hay before we'd run out of time.

2 serious PET PEEVES!!! First, never failed, just as you'd drag your soaking wet, tired, chaff from head to toe butt out of that mow for a drink of water, the welfare neighbor would go by with his fishing boat.

The other, now....the guy stacking on the wagon in the field has about the easiest non-tractor job there is, and AT LEAST has the benefit of having some air to breathe. It would never fail, the 2 poor saps in the mow, one of them always me, the last load of the day would get brought up, all of the sudden the bails are dropping in the barn like Normandy. And he'd be all Mr. Tough Guy (always the same guy),"Come on! We gotta get this done! Let's go!" And you'd be trying to finish up right under the conveyor, dog tired, last thing you wanted to hear was Mr. Gung ho cheerleader feeding the conveyor like shooting for a world record

Started working on a farm at 14 or 15 the father-in-law, he was retired from farming, and I would bale every other load he would drive the tractor and bale then we switched go like that all afternoon the owner and his wife and the other hired man would unload and mow.

My brother had bad knees from an accident so he coudln't walk on the bales in the barn so, as my dad would say, "just think how lucky you are, you get to work in the shade!"

     `The very first time I "drove" a tractor was Dad's WD pulling a wagon while Dad and his brother loaded my uncle's AC round bales on the wagon. I wasn't big enough to reach the pedals and could only  use the hand clutch. Mom had a fit when she found out but it was only low gear. Later when I was old enough I mowed away our hay in a barn that had a roof painted with black tar paint. Now that got hot. Can't think that it hurt me a bit and don't remember complaining; it was just part of farming about 60 years ago. The hay went to the mow via a Myers hay fork pulled up with a rope on the tractor that Mom drove. Dad set the fork; 10 bales at a time. I am told that it was the same system that was used when Dad was growing up on the farm except the hay was loose and was powered by horses. Dad said when he was young they would hire someone to bring a stationary baler to the barn and bale part of the hay into square bales. These were hauled with a horse and wagon to a railroad depot about 7 miles away and loaded onto a boxcar and sent to a city for horse hay. Guess someone bought the hay from my grandfather. The good old days.