Hi I'm Mike and this is Our Wyoming Life
As a kid, I remember driving by fields of hay bales and yelling at the top of my lungs
"Hay", maybe you did this too.
My parents would naturally freak out a little,
searching for the bus that was ready to hit
us, or the sharks falling from the sky.
Then I would point at the hay bales and say
Hay.
Needless to say my parents weren’t really
amused, but it’s my first memory of the
bundles of prairie grass, made solely for
the purpose of keeping animals alive during
the harsh winters.
Never in my wildest dreams would I think,
that years down the road, I would be spending
weeks of 10 hour days making those bales,
cutting the grass, raking the grass and then
baling it so that a herd of cows and a few
horses who depend on me for sustenance would
have something to eat all winter long,.
It’s my job now and I would love it, well
kind of love it.
It’s a love hate thing we got going on.
Haying is the process of cutting grass and
baling it for animals to eat during the winter,
we feed upwards of 5 tons of hay per day and
making sure we have the hay to feed starts
now, in June.
Up until now we’ve been watching the fields,
praying for rain and warding off hail to make
sure we have something to harvest and now
that the time has come, honestly it’s not
great.
Prairie grass here in Wyoming is a fickle
thing and lots of factors play into whether
or not we have a hay harvest, and the difference
between great hay and no hay can be a couple
inches of rain, or a cold snap that hits us
in May that stunts the growth, grasshoppers
can do a number on the hay crop and even the
wind can play a factor, which we have plenty
of.
This year, the hay was hindered by a lack
of rain in May and cold temperatures that
kept it from growing to its full potential,
but there is some and we need it.
We will end up buying hay this year but every
bale we can harvest saves the ranch a little
over 100 dollars so it’s worth it.
Haying starts with getting the equipment out
of storage and up and running, greasing, tightening
bolts and replacing anything that might need
replacement after sitting all winter long.
Haying is actually pretty time sensitive,
it needs to be done before the grass gets
too dry and too brittle to cut so we get right
to it.
Making hay isn’t hard, it’s a straight
forward process which begins with cutting
the grass with the swather, which has a 14foot
cutting head, 84 razor sharp blades and a
whole lot of horsepower to push the blades
through the grass, cutting it and laying it
out in neat little rows.
Unfortunately we have rocks which like to
break the blades and when that happens you
stop cutting and fix the blade, climbing under
and into the cutting head to do so.
It’s not fun, it’s dusty and hot and the
sharp blades love to take bites out of your
fingers, but once it’s done you are back
up and running.
After hours of driving in circles, cutting
grass at the mind blowing speed of 6 miles
per hour you have a field with grass lay down
in nice little piles called windrows.
The next step involves rolling these windrows
together, it’s not really a necessary step
but when you roll them together it takes less
time to bale and that’s important for a
number of reasons which we will get to in
a little bit.
Windrows are combined using a rake, in this
case a 30 foot wide V rake, which is pulled
behind a tractor, combining two or even 3
windrows into one.
When you have thicker hay, unlike this year
you don’t need to roll as many windrows
together, but with this thinner sparser hay
the more the merrier and we roll 3 or even
4 windrows together.
Then comes the baler.
The baler uses pickup teeth to pick the grass
up off the ground and the bigger the windrow,
the easier this is to do for the baler.
Once it picks it up, teeth move the hay in-between
belts that begin to roll it into a bale adding
more grass until the baler is full.
You want to make bales as fast as possible
and that’s another reason we put windrows
together, the more the hay rolls around in
the baler the more it turns to dust and the
longer it takes to make a bale.
Inside the tractor we have a baling monitor
that tells me how to control the grass that
is going into the baler, two bars represent
each side of the bale and the object of this
video game is to keep the two bars even as
you approach a full bale which is 60 inches.
You can actually change the size of your bale
but 60 inches works for me, so as we approach
that 60 inch mark we weave the tractor back
and forth, controlling which side of the baler
fills up more and evening the size of the
bale until the monitor beeps telling me it’s
full.
We stop and out comes a nice round bale and
we head out to do it again.
Like I said there are rocks out here which
play all kinds of havoc on haying equipment,
trust me, we’ve picked rocks till we are
blue in the face but in the end the keep growing
out of the field so we just try to coexist
with them peacefully.
However if there were a market for these stupid
little chucks of stone, I would quit ranching
and go into the annoying little rocks business,
but there isn’t.
The baler is notorious for picking up rocks,
you can try to dodge them, but eventually
the baler is going to yell at you and tell
you Slip!
Which means something is stuck in there; the
only option is to crawl up in the baler and
try to dig whatever you can, usually a rock.
Haying can be dangerous and safety is important,
the machine is shut down, put in park and
sometimes even the tires are blocked up so
nothing can roll before anyone can even start
to try to clear the blockage.
Then you squeeze yourself inside, clearing
hay out of the hay and searching for anything
that has stopping the internal mechanism from
working, usually a rock.
And there it is, jammed firmly into the teeth
that move the grass into the bale, once you
find it you can usually get it out pretty
easily and get back to making bales but sometimes
the worse happens and a rock gets just in
the right position and this happens.
A tooth bent completely over, a bigger problem
and needing some repair.
So it’s back to the shop where we cut bang
and grind until that tooth can be removed
and even though it’s not a total fix, the
tooth is now gone and it won’t be as efficient
at moving hay into the bale in that little
section of the baler we are back up and running
and baling again.
But then Mitch calls, and something is wrong
with the swather, a bolt has sheared off and
a bracket for the mechanism that actually
moves the cutting blades has broken in two.
This is a bigger problem, and the swather
is down until replacement parts can be ordered
and installed, which involves taking the whole
sway arm assembly off the swather.
The swather is dead in the water, or actually
the field, no more cutting, no more hay and
well crap.
Is this the end of haying season, will the
swather be fixed before the hay is too dry
to cut, will the rock army win and drive me
insane, find out next week....
Hold on, we do prepare for these situations
ya know, and out of mothballs come our old
hay mower, an 18 foot sickle mower to save
the day!
Three steps to haying, cutting, raking and
baling, I guess you could say four steps if
you add in fixing crap as it breaks.
Which there seems to be a lot more of than
actual haying, but in the end after Erin hears
me complain and whine, I really don’t mind
it too much.
It’s an important part of ranching, and
keeping the cows healthy and fed all winter
long is a step that can’t be skipped, no
matter how tired and cranky it makes you.
Thanks for joining us this week, it’s been
a busy one and it will continue to be busy
for the next few weeks as we hope to put up
around 150 tons of hay this summer, it’s
a drop in the bucket compared to what we need
but every little bit helps.
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you can’t find anywhere else, I'm off to
continue the wonderful haying experience and
I hope you have a great week and thanks for
joining us in our Wyoming life.
