Long-Delayed Update and Photos

It has been two months since I updated. We have done much hay-making, getting in both first and second cuttings of some fields. Our first cuttings of hay all went for horse feed, which will be used to feed the herd and the work-horses in winter. Winter feeding 39 horses takes a considerable amount of feed, and we have several thousand bales for that purpose. Most small square bales are around 50 to 75 pounds, so 2,000 to 3,000 bales is quite a lot of hay!

The hay-making process starts with mowing, which is done on this farm with horse-drawn mowers manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s. The mowers work surprisingly well despite their age, as long as they are regularly oild and sharpened. They work on a "ground-drive" system, which means that the back-and-forth action of the knife is created by the turning of the wheels. In short, the rotation of the wheels turns a system of gears, which in turn rotates a fly wheel, which rotates a pitman stick, which is attached to the knife, which moves backwards and forwards through the hay crop. This ingenious and simple system translates forward rotational motion into back-and-forth motion of the cutting knife.

After mowing, the hay is left down to dry for one or two days. In the East, a process called "tedding" would be undertaking during this time, which consists of fluffing the hay with a specially designed implement. In the dry arid West, however, tedding is unnecessary. The next process is raking, which is done with a tool called a side-delivery rake. It, like the mower, is ground-driven, with the wheels turning gears, which turns a bar covered in curved bars that move the hay into a long windrow. You simply drive along in a straight (more or less, depending on your skill level) line, and the rake does the work of sweeping it into a windrow. It is a difficult thing to do at times, as it requires some tight turns to make the windrows close enough together to sweep up all of the hay.

Raking alfalfa is time-sensitive, as it cannot be either too wet or too dry. If it is too wet, it will rot. If it is too dry, the leaves (the most valuable part, and the part that the Maders sell to the herb companies) will fall off, or "shatter" in the hay-making jargon.

The final process is baling, which is one of the few things that the Maders do with a tractor. Balers require so much power to compress hay into flakes and tie the flakes into bundles that they virtually require the engine-driven power provided by a tractor. There are motorized hitch carts that horses can pull that will supply the neccessary power with considerably less fuel than a tractor would use, but the Maders do not have one (at least not yet).

After the bales are formed, the tractor can pick them up with another power-driven implement called a bale wagon or stack-liner, or we can go into the field with a horse-drawn wagon and pick them up manually. The latter is preferable because of the fuel savings, but we have done the bale pick-up in both ways.

I hope I have not gone into too much jargon and so on in the preceeding, but hay-making is a complex art that is difficult to explain. Hay should really be green on the inside of the bale when you take it apart, even though most people think of hay as a light brown color. Hay turns this light brown color because it gets rained on, which leaches out nutrients, or because it is exposed to light for too long. Out here in the West, hay is almost always of a consisently high quality compared to Eastern, rained-on hay. (Sorry Eastern hay-makers.)

I have posted a few pictures below that will show some things that have been going on around here.

Above is Ben, probably my favorite horse, being driven on a cultivator by Ryan, another intern. Ryan and his girlfriend Casey left a couple of weeks ago after working at the Mader farm for five and a half months.

Here is the horse-drawn wagon being stacked full of hay. Mirah the dog thinks she is being very helpful (she's not). That is Lisa, another intern, on top of the hay stack.

Here's a boring picture of sprinkler pipe in the farm's flattest and best field (plainly known as the Flat Field). The quarter-mile of pipe shown has to be moved twice daily for about two weeks to make it across the 35 acre field.

Here is a shot of me driving horses Flag (on the left from this view) and 'Miah (on the right). That is Ken, who is trying to start his own farm around here, on the hay stack. He has been helping out a lot since Ryan and Casey left.

Same horses, same driver.

The view from the driver's perspective on the wagon. I took this while driving that same load of hay to be stacked by the combine that cleans the alfalfa leaf.