… what a waste of a perfect day for haying.
The neighbors have been putting in hay for the past few weeks, taking advantage of a patch of sunshine and high clouds, the same few weeks of the year when we used to put in hay when I was growing up on Waschke Road. The uncut fields ripple in waves like they did sixty years ago, and I imagine the hay tastes the same to the cattle and horses who chew it up and swallow it down, but much has changed in the intervening decades.
I’m not here to say the old ways were better, only that they were different and I remember them.
When I was a kid, neighbors hayed together and haying was an event, a gathering of neighbors, friends, and relatives. Cousins sometimes came all the way from Seattle, traversing a hundred miles of two-lane highway to help with haying. In the 1950s and early 60s cars and tires were not what they are today. Air conditioners were unheard of and a flat tire, boiling radiator, or other mishap was to be expected.
Sometimes haying was closer to a reunion party than work. I remember hay wagons that held more helpers than hay.
My mother and grandmother always prepared hearty and special dishes for the shared meals. The dessert pies and cobblers were to look forward to. June and July are a little early for fresh fruit, but the freezer needed to be cleared out of last summer’s cherries, apples, blueberries, blackberries, and peaches.
Every year, my dad would set aside two or three of our own fields for hay. He also hayed the fields of several neighbors. Dad seldom paid money for the hay from those fields, but there were always bumper crops of vegetables, fruit, and corn from our garden and orchard; liver, heart, and sweetbread to share when we butchered; or spare bull calves to raise for beef. All these eventually found their way onto the tables of those neighbors who had fields for Dad to take the hay.
Dad also traded cutting and baling a neighbor’s hay for a load or two of bales for our barn. No one kept track of these interchanges in dollars and cents, but everyone was satisfied.
Farmers don’t store winter fodder the way we did anymore. Now, early in the season, late April and May, farmers cut fields, let the grass wilt, then bale it up into what look like white plastic marshmallows that they stack in the field or close to their dairy operation. These contain what we used to chop and blow into silos and let ferment into silage.
Later, in June and early July, they cut the grass, let it dry like we used to dry hay, bale it up in round bales so big that I can barely see over them, and load them on trucks. The process is all machine work. No sweating neighbors and teenagers, only tractors with air-conditioned cabs, trucks, and gallons of diesel fuel.
In my day, bales were three feet long and weighed between forty and eighty pounds, just right for teenage boys and the occasional husky girl to pick up and stack. Haying began with a couple of days overhauling and greasing equipment. Saw-like sickles were ground to gleaming razor sharp edges for cutting tough rye, timothy, fescue and orchard grass.
Haying was sweating in the open air under blue skies for four passes over a field: one to cut the grass, another to rake and twist it into windrows, a third to bale the windrows and finally haul the hay into the barn. The third and fourth pass were often combined.
The first three passes were jobs for a driver and tractor. The loading and hauling was for a gang of neighbors, relatives, and teenagers, toiling in the sun.
The other day, I was surprised to see a neighbor bale up what I guess is about sixty acres into small square bales like we used to store. Forty years of desk work and arthritis have intruded between the days when steel bale hooks felt like extensions of my hands bucking bales, but my interest piqued when I saw a string of wagons like those we used to haul loads back to the barn come down the road. Perhaps I’d get a few hours of nostalgia.
I was disappointed. A rig trailed behind the baler, compacting ten or so bales into a neat array. Then a tractor with a special front loader picked up the cluster of bales and placed it on a hay wagon. All diesel and no sweat.
Efficient, I suppose. But what a waste of a perfect day for haying.