Yeah, that was a dumb title, but I just couldn't resist.
The last couple weeks have been gorgeous, which for us means haying! Ben does the vast majority of the process, but I get to help out with it on weekends.
When a field looks ready to harvest for hay, the first thing we have to do is mow the grass. We have a mower that pulls behind the tractor, and it literally mows the grass and lays it down in nice long lines. I couldn't find a picture of the mower in action, but this is it! Its really wide so we can be relatively fuel efficient when mowing a large field.The other picture is a large field that is half-way through being mowed.
The last couple weeks have been gorgeous, which for us means haying! Ben does the vast majority of the process, but I get to help out with it on weekends.
When a field looks ready to harvest for hay, the first thing we have to do is mow the grass. We have a mower that pulls behind the tractor, and it literally mows the grass and lays it down in nice long lines. I couldn't find a picture of the mower in action, but this is it! Its really wide so we can be relatively fuel efficient when mowing a large field.The other picture is a large field that is half-way through being mowed.
The next step is tedding. Tedding is a process that flings all the grass out so that it can dry quicker in the sun. We have a tedder with 4 baskets that works nicely for this Each basket has little fingers that fling the hay as its spinning. Again, no action shots, but this photo is of the tedder. the field that its sitting in has been tedded too (see how the grass is flung everywhere and not in nice organized rows?)
We let the hay dry in the sun until it has very little moisture. Damp hay will get moldy, and we don't want that! Once its dry and ready to bale, we rake it up into long organized lines again, called "windrows". The rake is ground driven, meaning that the wheels rolling are what engage the gears and make it work. Our rake has a bunch of fingers that grab the hay as the rake is rotating, and moves it all to the left into a line. We pull the rake with the four wheeler. This is usually my job! This is about half of what the rake looks like, but you can see the nice lines that it makes compared to the tedded grass thats next to it.
Next is baling! Ben runs the baler along the windrows that were just raked, and picks the grass up. the baler has fingers that grab the grass and feed it into itself where it rolls it into a bale. It has sensors and knows how big each bale is growing as Ben is making it. When its big enough, Ben uses the controls to wrap string around the bale using the right spacing, and number of wraps, then cuts the string, opens the tailgate and drops the bale out! This part is really cool to watch.